Heather Croney

My journey into urban and regional planning was completely unexpected. Fourteen years ago, I was a lost college student at UCF, having changed my major 3 or 4 times, and working at Steak and Shake to pay the bills. A coworker who was friends with a traffic engineer connected me to a data collection opportunity where I would survey people at various destinations, asking where they came from and where they were going. It was supposed to be easy work for a few days, better pay than serving tables. But as I was doing it, I kept asking questions because I was curious about what would be done with the data and the whole process. That curiosity became the foundation of my career. I went on to earn my master's degree in urban and regional planning from UCF in 2020, right in the middle of COVID. I've spent 14 years in this field, and I'm currently a senior planner at Chen Moore and Associates, which I joined in early to mid-January of this year. Before that, I worked for Lake County Schools. I'm very involved with the Orlando metro section of the Florida chapter of the American Planning Association, and I've done public speaking, though not keynote speaking yet, and I've been a guest on a radio show.