Tom Draeger honored as Distinguished Alumnus

At this year's commencement ceremony, the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE) recognized Tom Draeger with the CEE Distinguished Alumni Award, honoring a long career in construction and decades of support for the department.

Draeger graduated from the UW with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering in 1968 and spent 37 years at Bechtel Corporation, retiring as senior vice president of the Bechtel Group and president of Bechtel Construction Operations. In that role, he oversaw major civil, airport, rail and transportation projects around the world, with assignments that took his family to Saudi Arabia, Ireland and Bahrain. He is a licensed professional engineer and a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

A lasting connection to the department

Draeger has stayed closely engaged with CEE for decades. He served on the College of Engineering Advisory Board for 11 years and was president of the Beavers, a heavy engineering construction association, in 2009. With his wife, Marilyn, he established an endowed professorship and a term faculty fellowship in the department in partnership with the Beavers Charitable Trust, and the couple has supported environmental engineering lab equipment. Draeger was also instrumental in creating the Beavers Charitable Trust Endowed Scholarship, which supports undergraduates in civil engineering.

Their giving supports two faculty positions in CEE: Stephen Muench, the Thomas R. and Marilyn M. Draeger / Beavers Endowed Professor, and Julian Yamaura, the Thomas and Marilyn Draeger / Beavers Charitable Trust Term Faculty Fellow.

Draeger traces his commitment to his senior year at the UW, when a scholarship covered more than half of his tuition and living expenses.

His success as a civil engineer and his generosity to the department and the CEE community “exemplify what it means to be a CEE alumnus,” said Department Chair Bart Nijssen.

Four lessons for the Class of 2026

Draeger could not attend the ceremony, but sent a statement, which was read by Professor Muench, who holds one of Draeger’s endowed faculty positions and has known him for 15 years. In his message to the graduating class, Draeger shared four pieces of advice drawn from his career in construction:

1. You must welcome and embrace change, or you will be left in the mud. My dad graduated from Marquette in 1932 using a slide rule. I graduated from the University of Washington in 1968 using a slide rule. Now we have these phones in our pockets that'll do many times the work of that slide rule. Other changes are going to come along in your career, and you have to embrace them. 
2. You can learn something from everyone. We ran the most remote job Bechtel had in the mountains of New Guinea in an old beat-up pickup truck, and we tore up a tire. We had a spare, but no jack. But we had two retired Guinean tribesmen riding in the back of the pickup. One of them took off into the woods and came back with a log, used a rock to create a lever, and we were back in business. We would have never ventured into the jungle or thought of a solution like he did. 
3. Women saved the construction industry. If it had not been for women going into construction, we would be in a lot of hurt. There are just not enough good people to do the work. We have a way to go, but on most projects today, a substantial part of the workforce, both supervision and craftspeople, is women, and the numbers are increasing. 
4. Never forget that people matter most. You are only going to be as good as the people you can get to work for and with you.