Civil engineering was in her veins. Even housekeeping couldn't change that.
Roxana Alvarado - Project Designer, Civil Engineering
Roxana Alvarado was fixing things before she had the words for what she was doing. Growing up in Venezuela after her parents’ divorce, she became the household problem-solver out of necessity: patching, figuring out, holding things together for her mother when no one else would. She loved it. By the time she was a teenager she had already fallen in love with the idea of designing and building spaces, even if she couldn’t yet name exactly what that love would become.
Architecture was the dream. The economics of Venezuela made it unreachable. So she made a strategic decision the way engineers do: define the goal, find an alternate route, and keep moving. She enrolled in interior design, intending to work and fund her way toward architecture eventually. What she found instead, while working on a construction site during her studies and watching both the architect and the engineer at work side by side, was something that fit her even better.
“Architects can create,” she says, “but who really builds is the civil engineer. We have to do the calculations. We have to see if this can work or not.”
A female senior engineer and supervisor she worked under saw the potential before Roxana had fully committed to it. She adjusted Roxana’s work schedule to give her two hours each afternoon to attend university and sent her off each day with a word of encouragement. Roxana passed the admission exam, enrolled in civil engineering, and began what would become nearly a decade of extraordinary, relentless effort.
She worked early mornings and studied late at night. She ate lunch on buses. She and her husband, who was simultaneously pursuing his own degree, built a system together: he would pick her up from the university with the children already in the car, she would take the kids home, put them to bed, and open her books. She graduated as a civil engineer with five children at home. When she crossed that finish line, her kids wore T-shirts that said it for her. “Mommy, you got it. You are a civil engineer.” “Hard,” she says simply, “but worth it.”
What came next was something no degree could have prepared her for. Venezuela became dangerous. Her husband’s life was at risk. They left everything — their careers, their community, the country she had built her entire professional identity inside — and came to the United States with no language, no connections, and no certainty about what came next.
Her first job in America was in housekeeping. She did it for over two years. And even then, she never stopped being an engineer in her mind. She approached every shift the way she would approach a project: break the goal into steps, assign time to each, check and review at the end.
“Civil engineering was in my veins. Even when I was doing housekeeping, I was thinking in procedures.”
When she was ready to come back to herself professionally, she told her husband: if I started in Venezuela as a drafter, I can start again here the same way. She got a job at a telecommunications company.
When asked about her technical skills she mentioned she had always worked in AutoCAD in English. The interviewer smiled. “If you know AutoCAD in English, you’ve already won half the interview.”
Three years of experience later, a close friend who worked at Interplan had been telling her for months that she had to apply. Before she ever got the chance, he lost his life to Covid. Months afterward, his wife called. He would have wanted her to be there, she said. There was a position open at Interplan. Please apply. “This is why I call him my angel,” Roxana says.
His wife had not known Roxana well. They were not close friends. But she had watched her husband believe in Roxana, talk about her potential, and push her toward this company with the kind of certainty that only comes from genuinely seeing something in someone. When he was gone, honoring that became part of how she honored him. That call was an act of love — not for Roxana, but for the man she had lost.
Roxana applied. She interviewed for an hour in English, was given a tour of the office, passed the CAD test, and was hired. She has been at Interplan nearly five years. She describes it, without hesitation, as a blessing. Her director always has an answer and always takes the time to explain the reasoning behind it. Her project manager pushes her consistently outside her comfort zone, sending her to lead presentations and site hearings that still make her hands sweat and her heart race. But when she finishes and turns around, he is always there. “Yeah, Roxy,” he tells her. “You can do it.”
She is building something here, the way she has always built things: carefully, procedurally, and with full knowledge of what it cost to get to the foundation.
“I never truly started from zero. Every experience helped build who I am today.”
Her five kids are growing up watching her do it. That, she will tell you, is the whole point.
