Designing the Way Forward

My name is Addison Hiller, and I’m from Edmonton, Alberta. I’m a musician and took time to pursue a career in music after graduating from high school. During that time, I had many amazing experiences and was able to travel across North America and Europe to record and perform. I also studied audio engineering and music production, which is where my love of engineering began. As I travelled through many different cities, I developed an interest in urban form and city infrastructure. This interest, and a desire to study engineering at a deeper level, is what led me to return to school and pursue a degree in civil engineering.

Why did you choose civil engineering at UBC? 

I chose civil engineering as it is a very broad area of engineering. Within the umbrella of civil engineering, there are many areas in which you can specialize. I felt interested in pursuing a field of study that would provide me with a broad set of skills and provide the opportunity to discover the area I connected with the most. UBC has a very highly regarded Civil Engineering program with excellent faculty who are experts in various specializations. This, combined with my affinity for the west coast led me to choose UBC.

As I moved through my academic journey, I began to realize an interest in transportation planning and engineering. Having the ability to shape how we move through our cities and influence the urban form is very exciting to me. This led me to tailor my fourth-year course selection to be transportation-focused.

How are you applying the skills you learned?

I’m applying the skills I learned at UBC in my current role as a Traffic Operations and Safety Analyst at Arcadis. The technical skills and theory that I learned at UBC come into play every day as we determine how we can improve our current transportation systems or create better ones for tomorrow. Equally important to the technical skills and theory are the soft skills that I learned throughout my time at UBC. We are taught that engineering is a team sport and are given many opportunities to develop qualities a good teammate should have, such as communication, patience, and cooperation, through a large amount of group labs and projects. These skills have been incredibly valuable.

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Who has made your time at UBC memorable?

During the summer between my third and fourth year, I had the opportunity to work as a Research Intern in Transportation Engineering for Dr. Amy Kim through UBC’s work learn program. I assisted a PhD student with a wildfire evacuation simulation that was part of a larger study for Infrastructure Canada. This experience was incredibly interesting and valuable as it introduced me to macroscopic transportation simulation and provided me with the opportunity to develop my programming skills. It remains the highlight of my undergraduate experience.

What advice would you give a student entering your program? 

My advice would be to dig as deep as you can. Completing an engineering degree is an amazing experience. You may never have the same time or space to ask big questions and gain powerful knowledge as you do during your studies. So don’t take it for granted and push yourself to get as much out of it as you can. There is value in every piece of knowledge, even if you initially think it is something you may never “use”. 

Rather than instructing me on how to use today’s tools to solve today’s problems, my studies at UBC provided me with a sound theoretical framework and understanding of concepts that can be applied to solve many different problems. I feel this robust knowledge base has set me up to tackle many of the future evolving challenges we will face throughout my career. 

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What is next for you? 

I look forward to pursuing my career in transportation planning and engineering and obtaining my Professional Engineer designation over the next few years.