Candice Sexton, a PhD student in the School of Construction Management Technology (CMT), was recently awarded a one-time accolade by Purdue University called the Efficiency Improvements Award.
Purdue created this award category late last year, and Sexton is part of a small cohort of winners from around the university who received their awards between February and March of 2024.
Sexton, a professional with many years of experience in the construction industry, returned to her alma mater in 2019 to pursue a doctorate with financial help from sources like the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) INCLUDES Fellowship.
“I feel lucky to receive these accolades since coming to Purdue, some of which are pretty selective,” Sexton said. “There was the Efficiency Award recently, but even when it comes to the INCLUDES Fellowship—that really helped me go back to school and if I remember correctly I was one of only seven or eight people in the country to be awarded.”
Becoming an advocate
Sexton explained that a longstanding desire to teach students has been the primary motivator to get her doctorate. “I can go into a classroom with the perspective of quite a bit of industry experience… but that experience also worked for the department’s needs on a wider scale when it came to outreach.”
These unique perspectives worked so well for CMT that they ultimately netted Sexton the Efficiency Award. Sexton has succeeded in recruiting interested high-schoolers through communicating a sense of belonging from her time in industry. Those experiences include the many instances where she served as the rare female employee on large-scale construction projects.
Pulling from real life
Such projects include a massive expansion to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in the mid-80s—a job which not only required armies of workers but also a dedicated staff of managers and planners. Those managers were expected not only to execute plans, but also to translate ideas into plain-English from hyper-conceptual architects like Helmut Jahn. Sexton was one such manager.
Drawing from this depth of experience has helped speak to young women and other underrepresented student groups; Sexton reports great experiences during Purdue Polytechnic’s TEAM and TOTAL summer camps. This increase in the effectiveness of recruitment, combined with Sexton’s dedication to her faculty mentor Jiansong Zhang’s latest work, led to her clinching the Efficiency Award.
Entrepreneurship
“Dr. Zhang’s work has been really interesting, and he’s been consulting NSF’s I-Corps grant in regards to funding,” Sexton stated. I-Corps provides a funding structure for projects that have a chance of becoming commercially viable products. The grant replicates many of the market tests used in entrepreneurial environments, including audience studies, supply chain analysis and more.
“So I helped to conduct over 100 qualitative interviews having to do with this potential product, to see if real-world clients would find the product useful, what could be improved, and all that.”
While the product Zhang presented to I-Corps is still under wraps, the hope is for the final product to be a massive time-saver for creating digital construction blueprints and building-info modeling.
Zhang separately praised Sexton’s efforts during her time as a PhD student. “Candice… has provided substantial improvements in overall department efficiency,” he said.
In addition to Sexton’s efforts with the TEAM and TOTAL camps as well as I-Corps, Zhang noted that her commitments to the Women in Construction Management student group and to CMT curriculum reform more generally have been “tremendous.”
A better future for women in construction
“For me, the point is that young girls often haven’t had someone talk about construction as a field where they might have a place. Someone just needs to show them that there are a whole variety of careers even at the leadership level that are available to them,” Sexton said.
“I think that, between the [Polytechnic] student ambassadors and me, these kids can see that we’re excited about what we’re doing. And I think the enthusiasm is infectious. We try to show them something real—we’re doing an applied science, after all. That has a really tremendous draw that can’t be put into words for a lot of these kids, and we’re here to help them.”
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