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Leading ASCE into the future
Since graduating from the University, Dennis Martenson (BCE ’65, MSCE ’67) has had a three-decade career as an environmental engineer, most recently as a senior project manager at CDM in St. Paul.
In October, he became president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the largest professional organization serving civil engineers, with 135,000 members worldwide.
Martenson has served as president of the ASCE Minnesota Section, as ASCE District 8 director, and as ASCE Zone III vice president, among other roles in the organization.
As part of a state-by-state tour of ASCE chapters, Martenson met with members of the University of Minnesota student chapter in April.
One of his priorities as president is to promote ASCE’s Body of Knowledge standards, which encourage engineers to take 30 credits past a bachelor’s degree before they practice in the field, he said.
“Employers in the last 15 plus years have been less satisfied with the B.S. degree as really adequate preparation,” he said.
Many specialty areas, such as structural, environmental and hydraulic engineering require a more background than a general four-year degree can supply.
And there’s also been a shift in recent years for consulting companies to hire engineers with master’s degrees, rather than investing in extensive on-the-job training for young engineers, he said.
“It’s related to the pressures to be billable,” he said.
The state registration board in Nebraska has adopted the Body of Knowledge standards, and several universities are considering it, he said. That represents a pendulum swing back to the five-year engineering degree that was standard until the late 1960s, he said.
“If you go back in history, Minnesota was one of the last schools that had a five-year program,” he said. “After my sophomore year as a student, they dropped that to four years because of competitive pressures.”
In his visits to student chapters, Martenson said has found a lot of enthusiasm among students for civil engineering. And new graduates are entering a healthy job market.
“They’re getting multiple job offers, which was also the case when I graduated,” he said.
Martenson said one of the challenges for ASCE will be to help attract more women and minority students into the field. He said the organization is using its K-12 outreach to get students excited about science and math and help them understand what engineers do on the job.
He also hopes to get young engineers more involved in ASCE. The organization currently has 25,000 student members, but only about 2,000 a year join as professional members when they graduate.
“We want them to become members and be active,” he said. “They’re really the future lifeblood of the organization.”
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