Transportation is expansive, and there’s a place for everyone. Though, Samantha Taningco didn’t quite know her place when she came to the University of Florida in 2009. A Civil Engineering major, she was interested in structures but wasn’t sure what path she wanted to take.
That was until she took Introduction to Transportation with Dr. Dimitra Michalaka, a UF Alumni and Introduction to Transportation Instructor who now works as faculty at the Citadel.
“Dr. Michalaka was really enthusiastic about transportation,” Taningco explained. “She really cared about her students and made the class easy to enjoy.”
In addition to the welcoming learning environment, Taningco enjoyed the guest speakers brought in to talk to the class about jobs in the Transportation field. Two in particular stood out to her.
The first was Bill Sampson, Director of the McTrans Center. The McTrans Center at the University of Florida distributes and supports software programs for traffic engineering and transportation planning applications, with training courses also available.
The second was Matthew Weisman, another UF alumni, who at the time was working for the City of Gainesville. He was the city’s Traffic Operations Manager from 2006 to 2014, and then left Gainesville to start his own consulting firm, Hoffman, Weisman & Associates in Jupiter, Fla.
Taking a leap of faith, Taningco emailed them both for potential opportunities. To her surprise- both responded! Weisman ended up helping her get a volunteer position working at the Gainesville Traffic Management Center (TMC) that summer. Sampson met with her in-person and hired her almost on the spot at McTrans as a software tester. Because of class conflicts, she was not able to continue on with TMC after that summer, but she did continue with her work at McTrans through the rest of her undergraduate career.
McTrans even offered her a graduate assistantship to fund her master’s degree in Civil Engineering at UF, which she began in Spring of 2015. In addition to her work as a software tester, she helped monitor webinars and was a teaching assistant for a couple of Sampson’s classes at UF.
“Professor Sampson is very understanding,” she explained. “My dad had a stroke in October 2015, so there was a lot going on in my personal life. But he (Sampson) always made sure I knew I still had a place at McTrans and even allowed me to cancel his classes since I was his teaching assistant at the time.”
“Samantha is one of the hardest workers that I know,” Larry Dorilus, a fellow Master’s student and friend, said. “She goes out of her way to help any of her students.”
On April 29, 2016, she walked across the stage for a second time, a master’s degree in hand. But she’s not leaving Gainesville quite yet, in fact, she’s already been hired to stay on full time at McTrans!
When asked if she had any advice, her response was immediate: “Put yourself out there, talk to people, and do what feels right for you.”