Her Story
About Grishma
I've been in the construction field for almost 10 years now, counting all my internships and experience. My main area of expertise is construction coordination, handling all the different trades and trade partners. What I really do is clash coordination - we get 3D models and coordinate them, building everything virtually first before it's done in the field. We try to figure out any issues, any schedule delays, anything that we can to help the team in the field as much as possible before they find all the issues on site. I've worked on battery plants in the past, and currently I'm working on mission-critical data centers. My key responsibilities include a lot of time management, managing and coordinating with all our trade partners, getting models from them, federating all the models, doing clash detection and coordination, running all the weekly meetings we have for coordination to go over the issues or clashes, and we're also doing reality captures and laser scanning. What I love about what I'm doing is that I like construction, but I don't want to be on the field all day. I can do my job remotely - I don't have to be on a site that's 500 miles from where I am located. We're also doing a lot of reality capture, laser scanning, and trying to incorporate new technologies in our department. That's something that really excites me and motivates me for my job - I'm not stuck doing one thing, there are 10 other things that I could try and test and implement on the projects I'm working on. It's not a boring 9-to-5 job, there's something interesting and exciting every single day.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Grishma
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would say my parents. I have seen my parents struggle their entire life, building their family and supporting their family with whatever they had. I mean, we're not from a very well-to-do family, but also not from a lower-middle-class family or anything like that. That's what I see - my parents struggled a lot throughout that, and I want to do the same thing for myself and my family. I want to provide whatever I can for them.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Just take one day at a time, try to learn as many things as possible, but also at the same time choose a couple of areas where they are very interested in, or what they can expertise on. Construction is a very wide field. There are so many things you can do in construction. And it's good to have knowledge about all of them, like estimating, scheduling, all sorts of things, like what's happening on the field. It's good to have knowledge on all of them, but at the same point, you also need to have one expertise that you want to build your career on.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
My field right now is very technology dependent, so that's the biggest challenge - you need to keep up with the technologies and the changes. For example, Autodesk Revit is a 3D modeling software, and they come up with updates every year. There's not one way of doing things in Revit, there are like 10 ways to do just one thing. So it's like, to just keep up with that, and keep up with the technology, the growing technology, the changing tech - now we are in the AI era. So it's like, just keeping up with all those, I think that's the biggest challenge, but it's also something where you learn something new every day.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I think passion and integrity to whatever you're doing. You need to be committed to your work. I think that's the most important thing, is how passionate and how committed you are towards your work.
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