MARIA HOWELL
Job Title: Electrical Engineer
Company: Burns & McDonnell
Location: Kansas City, Mo.
Age: 27
Years on the Job: 5
Interests: Spending time outdoors, rollerblading, hiking, and traveling. She is also in a book club, plays sand volleyball and slow pitch softball, and likes to find new coffee shops and visit new places. When she’s home, she enjoys spending time with her cat, Raymond.
Maria Howell didn’t always dream of designing industrial power systems, and her path to the electrical industry was forged through experiences and interests realized over time.
“It started in high school with my physics teacher who just made the material so much fun that I wanted to learn more,” she says.
She double-majored in physics and electrical engineering and minored in business and nuclear engineering at the University of Missouri-Columbia, which cemented her desire to go into the power construction and design industry.
Born and raised in a suburb of Chicago, she interned at Burns & McDonnell, where she landed a spot in the Global Facilities group.
“I loved the people and the energy and decided to accept an offer to stay with the team after graduation,” she says.
Upon joining the company, she volunteered to spend a year on a site in Kansas to be able to see firsthand how designs go from paper to lights on. During this time, she was able to see and experience a lot of practical training moments firsthand.
“There’s no better training than seeing everything unfold in front of you and being able to ask application questions of the techs and electricians who work with the materials you specify daily,” she says. “From wire pulls to breaker settings to temporary power conditions to vendor requests and requirements, I was able to soak in a vast amount of knowledge from my time out there.”
Now, as a licensed electrical engineer for the Food & Beverage team, she creates drawings, meets with equipment vendors and clients, reviews site conditions, and performs design calculations. When she’s in the field, she visits the various project sites, leads outages to execute fast-paced projects, and also walks with potential subcontractors on the job site.
