she was built for this. She Has Spent Nineteen Years Proving it.
Sylvia Nassif - Principal, MEP Engineering Services
Sylvia Nassif did not stumble into engineering. She was raised inside it.
Her parents were both aeronautical engineers in Cairo, and their work was never left at the office. It came home. It sat at the table. Every day over lunch, they talked through problems, debated solutions, and moved through the kind of precise, methodical thinking that most children never witness up close. Sylvia listened to all of it. She absorbed it the way children absorb language, not by studying it, but by being surrounded by it until it became part of how she thought.
“Listening to them having conversations over lunch every day, going through their work, all of these discussions, it was fascinating to me. That’s what really got me into engineering. The love of engineering.”
That love was shaped by two people who modeled what it looked like to build a reputation on your work ethic and protect it fiercely. Her father demonstrated that most clearly during her senior year internship.
When she was unable to land one on her own, he arranged for her to intern at the airline company where he was technical director. But he refused to let it look like a favor. He instructed HR not to pay her. He covered her compensation out of his own pocket, quietly, so that no one could question whether she had earned her place there.
“It is like these kind of things that really resonated with me throughout my career. You have to build this work ethic and stick by it.”
She carried that standard when she graduated with a 3.97 GPA, got married, and moved to Orlando. Through a chance encounter her husband had after a church visit, a connection formed with an Interplan employee, and an opening came up in the MEP department. She had no resume prepared. She scrambled one together and submitted it anyway.
The interview with Frank, the head of MEP, was short. He looked at her GPA and asked if it was real. She confirmed it was. Then he asked the question that would define the next nineteen years: Are you willing to learn? She said yes. He said fine. That was it.
She walked out convinced she had failed. She sat in the Burger King next door, waited for her husband, and nearly cried telling him it hadn’t gone well. On a Saturday, over the Fourth of July weekend, Frank called with an offer. She bought her first car that weekend and started the following week.
What happened next says everything about who she is. She arrived green, with no practical experience and a 3.97 GPA that meant very little in the field. She could have coasted on potential. Instead she built a system. Every code reference Frank gave her went onto a sticky note, which went onto her screen, where it stayed until she had looked it up, understood it fully, and could apply it herself. She didn’t wait to be handed things. She wrote everything down, tracked everything down, and confirmed with Frank only what she couldn’t resolve on her own. She still has those notes.
That same discipline carried her through the hardest professional test of her career. In 2014, with her second son barely over a year old, she pursued her PE license.
The preparation was months of intensive study stacked on top of full-time work and motherhood — 17 online lessons, each four hours long, none of them actually four hours because they required research and calculation and deep review. Her husband cleared her schedule, took over everything else, and told her to focus on nothing until it was done.
The exam nearly broke her. The first four-hour session was brutal. She walked out, sat in her car, and cried. She told herself there was no point in going back in. Her husband asked a simple question: what is the worst thing that could happen? She went back in. The second session was easier. She passed on her first attempt.
When Interplan opened its first international office in Cairo, Sylvia was part of the team that made it happen. She recruited from her own university, helped navigate logistics the company had never touched before, and built out a team in a city she knew personally but had never worked in professionally. By September 2022 the first two hires were in place. Today Cairo represents 34.3% of Interplan’s entire MEP department — not a satellite, not a satellite office running support work, but a fully integrated part of how the firm delivers for its clients every day. The office has grown every year since she helped build it.
And inside the MEP department she has helped shape, the numbers tell their own story. When she arrived in 2007 there were two other women. Today more than half the department is female. She does not take that lightly. She knows what it took to get there, and she knows it did not happen by accident.
“If you truly enjoy what you’re doing and what you’re working on, you will become unstoppable. What is measurable is finishing an entire project and being proud to have your name on it.”
Her name is on a great many things. She is not finished yet.
