Nicole Rice

My career in environmental engineering began right after graduating from Penn State in 2006. I had initially been in structural engineering, but after taking my first environmental class where they talked about Love Canal and how companies had dumped toxic waste and built neighborhoods on top of it, I felt very connected to it, especially considering everything my mom was going through with cancer at the time. I started at Conestoga Rovers doing remediation work with retail gasoline stations and landfills, then moved to Tetra Tech working on big superfund sites with the Navy and Coast Guard. When a friend told me about an opportunity in New York City, I jumped at it - my husband and I packed up and moved, even though he didn't have a job lined up. Those 7 years in New York were transformative. I met a supervisor who became an incredible mentor - she took me to professional industry events, founded the Women at Langan Employee Resource Group, brought me to client meetings and made me speak, and really put into my head that I could be more than just a project manager, that I could be a shareholder at the company one day. She was also a working mother, which was really helpful when I became pregnant with my first daughter. After my second daughter was born during COVID, my husband and I decided to move back to Pittsburgh to be closer to family. I've been back for 8 years now, and I've grown the environmental team from one person to 16 people with locations in Cleveland and expansion plans for Columbus. I became an equity owner 2 years ago, and now I manage a national due diligence portfolio working with teams across the U.S. The most rewarding part is that I now get to mentor two incredibly talented women on my team who are also working mothers, helping them navigate career and motherhood just like my mentor helped me, and letting them know that they don't need to choose - we can work with them however they need.