Alumni Profile: Chanlin Wong, BS 2017

I currently work for Kimley-Horn in the Raleigh office, which is the company headquarters. Our office has about 250 people in it, and 30 of them work with me on the transportation and traffic team.

I am glad I chose to work in the Raleigh office because there are many opportunities within transportation.

We have many disciplines, from structures, to roadway, to land development. It is also helpful that our marketing and communications department is housed here, along with many firm-wide executives.

So far, I have worked on a variety of teams, from traffic to signals to intelligent traffic systems, or ITS. Our traffic team has been conducting traffic impact assessments for the private sector and traffic capacity work for the public sector.

Our team collects data, runs synchro analysis, and formulates reports to deliver to the Department of Transportation. We work closely with our roadway team to accomplish this, since they are designing the roads.

The economy is good right now, so there is plenty of work. I have worked on two traffic capacity reports for "superstreet" corridors, which are major commuter routes with side-streets that do not allow left turns, thereby prioritizing through-movements.

Our signals team has a huge project involving the upgrade of the entire city of Durham signal system to new software that will improve reliability and management on the owner side. This requires we perform 400 signal designs over the next year, and I have been working on these designs extensively.

On the ITS side, I have gotten the chance to work on some fiber and technology projects for the North Carolina DOT, which has recently revamped a lot of its organizational structures and is sending most of its work to consultants, which benefits us.

I have only been working for four months, but I have learned so much already.