Mary Catherine Price remembers the first time she thought about what she wanted to do when she grew up. She admits that when she was asked to write an essay in her 6^th grade class on the topic, “I really had never thought about it before.” Upon a suggestion from her mother, who pointed to her love for math and science, Mary Catherine began looking into engineering. When asked to choose a major at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, she picked Civil Engineering and never looked back.

While at UAB, Mary Catherine was a member of four honor societies, participating as an officer in Chi Epsilon, the US national civil engineering undergraduate honor society. Finishing UAB as a cum laude graduate, she went on to attend the University of Tennessee to earn her Master of Science in Environmental Engineering, a degree that included a focus on chemistry.

Mary Catherine identifies attending WEFTEC (the Water Environment Federation’s annual Technical Exhibition and Conference) as her most influential work experience to date. She says, “Coming right out of school, I hadn’t been able to get up close with a lot of the valves, tanks and pumps that were being referenced in plans.  Attending WEFTEC allowed me to get a firsthand look at how things worked and the purpose of their placement in projects.”

As an Engineer Intern and the newest addition to Goodwyn, Mills and Cawood’s Greenville office, Mary Catherine assists the project managers with all aspects of engineering design and project development. She has helped the team with multiple municipal projects to date, including work on water mains, gravity sewers, force mains, pump stations and rail spurs. Her dream project is to work on a large water desalination process and pipeline spanning hundreds of miles, though “hopefully our local water supply will never be scarce enough to need this,” she adds.