During her first week working on a construction site in 1978, Jennifer Pinck was painting a K-Mart when she noticed a man on the other end of the mall wearing a white hardhat and holding a clipboard. The man was supervising a steel-hanging crew. “I didn’t even know what the job was, but knew I wanted it,” the 63-year-old Pinck said during ENR New England’s December Best Projects awards event in Boston.
After her brief stint in commercial painting, Pinck went on to hold more than just a clipboard. The future field engineer and superintendent eventually became the first woman to receive her Boston ABC Building License and also earned an MBA. She has worked on two of the country’s largest public works projects: as a construction manager for the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) Boston Harbor project from 1988 to 1992 and immediately following that became a senior manager for Boston’s Central Artery/Tunnel project known as the Big Dig, where she worked until 1996.