she could barely draw a line. Now she Leads The Team.
Krishna Desai- Project Manager, Civil Engineering
Krishna Desai will tell you exactly how her engineering career began: with a CAD test she could barely attempt, a quiet cry at the end of it, and a hiring decision that defied every expectation she had walking out of that room.
She had been upfront from the start. Before sitting down for her interview at Interplan fresh out of UCF, she told her interviewer plainly: I know nothing about CAD, and I don’t want to hide that. Two nights before the test, she had bought a copy of AutoCAD for Dummies. She read it. She did not practice. It did not help.
“I sat in the test and could barely draw a line,” she says.
Stuart, the director of civil engineering, came to check on her when it was done. He confirmed what she already knew. She hadn’t done well. What he told her months later, though, reframed everything: the CAD test was never a pass-fail moment. It was simply a baseline to understand where she was and how far she had to go. “That helped my confidence at least stay afloat. I was like, okay, there’s still a chance.”
She chose Interplan because it was the only place where the interview felt like a safe space. For Krishna, that mattered the most.
Growing up in a household shaped by the cultural values her parents brought from India, she absorbed early on that women were expected to be soft spoken, that mistakes drew attention, and that speaking up without something certain to say was better avoided. Her father pushed back against that constantly, encouraging her to take up space. But the environment had still left its mark. By the time she entered the workforce, the fear of being wrong was something she carried quietly into every room. “The fear I have,” she says, “is because I care.”
Krishna’s early months tested her fast. A period of turnover meant she was learning the role while adapting to multiple leaders in quick succession, each with different expectations and different ways of working. She nearly quit. “That was the only time I was like, I have to quit. I couldn’t keep track.”
She went to Stuart instead. His response didn’t solve the problem so much as it dissolved it: learning to work with different personalities wasn’t a burden, he told her. It was exactly the skill that client work in the real world would require. Every client is different. Every relationship requires something different. The chaos she was living through was actually preparation.
“It was more of a give up moment,” she reflects, “but also a turning moment that helped me. I just couldn’t see it until after.”
What followed was years of steady, deliberate growth, shaped largely by a mentorship philosophy that Stuart practiced consistently: don’t give people the answer, give them the process. He would send Krishna to find documentation he already had pulled up on his own screen. She would get frustrated. She would come back. He would ask what she had tried, and point her toward what to try next. No judgment. No impatience. “It made me feel like he genuinely wants me to learn. It’s not like he just needs me to do the right thing and get it out the door.”
The moment her confidence truly shifted came at a preconstruction site visit. Construction issues had arisen that could delay the project by months. Without being told to, Krishna picked up the phone. She called the power company. She called the client. She called permitting. She worked the problem. “That’s when I realized it wasn’t based off just my qualifications. It was the confidence. It was the knowing what to do next.”
When she was promoted to project manager, she became the first woman to ever hold that title in the civil department. She was also the youngest person in the department. She knew some colleagues had a history of difficulty working with or for women, particularly younger ones. She filed that information away and kept working. “For some reason, it always gave me another reason to be stronger,” she says.
She is now on the other side of that journey, mentoring her own team using the same philosophy that was modeled for her. She doesn’t give them answers. She gives them direction and lets them find the way. She tells them it’s okay to be wrong, as long as they learn from it. “I have the power to shift mindsets. If there are people that think women can’t do the same job as a man, I’ll be the one to show them that we can.”
