THEY KEPT SAYING NO. SHE NEVER LISTENED.
Rissa Torgersen - Project Designer, Civil Engineering
There is a version of Rissa Torgersen’s story where she gives up. Where the umpteenth rejection letter lands and she decides the answer is no, that it has always been no, and that she should stop trying to make it something else.
That version of the story does not exist.
“When the door was shut, I was trying to climb in the window,” she says.”When the window was shut, I was trying to climb in the skylight. I was determined.”
Rissa grew up in a small rural town north of Sacramento, so rural her husband jokes they rode horses to school. When it came time to apply to
college, she did everything right. She had a 4.1 GPA. She had extracurriculars, volunteer work, a full roster of everything that was supposed to matter. What came back was rejection after rejection – more
than she cares to count, more than anyone who did everything right should ever have to absorb.
The letters kept coming. Each one landed the same way. One of the schools she had applied to, Cal Poly, later had its hiring director removed from his position for racially discriminatory practices. Rissa is mixed race. She does not need to say much more than that.
“I just kept looking,” she says. “If you’re not gonna take me, somebody out there will.”
Then came the counselor. At a community college she briefly enrolled in,she tried to sign up for a math class she had already taken in high school and passed with A’s. The counselor looked at her and said he wasn’t sure
she had the capacity to handle it. He suggested something two or three levels lower. While she sat there, absorbing that, he turned to the male student sitting beside her, a sports major, and signed him up for a
significantly more advanced course without hesitation.
“That’s when it finally clicked,” she says. “You almost want to think, no,they’re not being sexist. But when that realization finally hits, it’s just like,that’s not okay.”
She went home and withdrew from the college the same day. “I don’t regret knowing my worth.”
The turn came the way the best ones do: sideways,
and while she was asleep. On a family vacation to
Orlando, she had reached a place of real defeat.
During a drive near UCF, exhausted and
discouraged, she fell asleep in the car. Her family,
who had never stopped believing she would find her
way, quietly got out and walked toward the visitor’s
center without her. When she woke, brochures were
in her lap. Her family had walked in without her,
gathered everything she would need, and come
back to the car to place it there. People who refused
to let her stop.
She applied. She got in. She moved across the
country.
A year and a half later she met the man who would
become her husband, marrying him one week
before the pandemic shut everything down. Her
schedule in that final year was the kind that doesn’t
leave room for much else. Work from 7am to 5pm.Class from 5pm to 11pm.
Homework until she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She meal-prepped so she could eat dinner in a campus cafeteria microwave between shifts. She protected the weekends like they were something precious,
grinding through the weeks so she could have two days to breathe.
She found lnterplan almost by accident. She had considered skipping class that day, but showed up anyway – and lnterplan happened to be there ,invited as a guest to give a career presentation. Something about what she heard clicked everything into place. The drawing, the problem-solving, the way technical precision and creativity could exist in the same career. She went up to the HR coordinator after. Two weeks later she was hired. She got the all on her way home from the interview.
She joined a team of mostly men. She noticed. Then she moved on.
“It didn’t feel like there was a divide with them being men and me being one of the few women. It just felt like I was the least experienced, and it was all about my superiors putting effort into me and figuring out where I could go and how they could help get me there.”
She was the commencement speaker at her college
graduation. Standing at that podium, she spoke the
words she had earned the hard way.
“Your worth isn’t measured by someone else’s opinion, and your limits aren’t set by someone else’s imagination. Even if you were told your chances were 0.001, your potential isn’t up for debate. It’s yours to define. So don’t let anyone tell you who you are, don’t let anyone draw the line for what you can or can’t do. Stand tall, speak up, and keep pushing forward.”
She was not just speaking to her graduating class. She was speaking from experience.
