Sparking Commitment: How AEP and Brasfield and Gorrie helped a freshman stay the course

If Brie Palmer has one piece of advice for high school seniors interested in engineering, it's this: Take the tours. 

A tour led her to study engineering at Auburn. 

A tour led her to keep studying engineering at Auburn. 

She has the Engineering Academic Excellence Program (AEP) to thank for both. 

"Around Thanksgiving break my freshman year, I was toying with switching majors," said the sophomore in civil engineering. "At the time, there was just nothing firing me up about engineering." 

That all changed during an experiential learning opportunity at Brasfield & Gorrie's Birmingham headquarters in 2018. The privately held construction firm, one of the largest in the nation, has partnered with AEP, an academic and professional development support program geared toward underrepresented students, since 1996.

Palmer is a recipient of the Alabama Power/Southern Company Minority Annual Scholarship; Alabama Power is a founding sponsor of AEP.

"At the time, Brie was a freshman in Engineering taking our AEP Learning Community course," said AEP program coordinator Eric Hall. "We held a class session on career exploration and Brie was not sure about her major and career path at the moment. We try to provide students opportunities to see engineering through multiple lenses to hopefully spark their commitment to this major going forward.

"Eventually, we setup an organized visit with Brasfield & Gorrie to provide a great snapshot experience." 

It worked.

"I'd been thinking of switching majors to building science," said Palmer, who is interested in a career in construction. "But while I was on the tour, pretty much every civil engineer there told me 'don't do it, don't switch, you'll beat the curve in less than six months and you'll be paid more.'"

That's all it took. 

Palmer stuck it out and hasn't looked back. And she hasn't stopped taking advantage of the services provided by AEP.

"I would definitely tell people to just get involved," she said. "You get as much out of it as you put into it."