Driving success

The best part about problems is that there are always solutions. When A is added to B, it must equal C.

When a river stretches in the way of a road, there is always a way above, around, or underneath. Or when the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) needs 40 miles of elevated highway stretching from downtown San Antonio to the city’s northeast corner, there is always a path forward.

South Texas Transportation Team Leader Aimee Schroller, PE, is a lifelong problem-solver, someone who spent her childhood in the San Antonio area, someone who loved the challenge of a math problem and the finality of its solution. It was largely for this reason that she was drawn to engineering, and why she has made such a successful career of it in her hometown.

But what Schroller found to be true in this field, time and time again, is that so much of engineering goes beyond the black and white parameters of mathematical problem sets. Particularly when it comes to people. So, when tasked with establishing a Garver Transportation presence in San Antonio, she saw not a problem but an opportunity born from the autonomy to build a team with those passionate to improve their communities.

“To build a team from the ground up with the upward momentum to build off of, it was an opportunity I could not pass up” she said.

Fast forward five years and Schroller has assembled a talented, hard-working South Texas Transportation Team of experts capable of meeting large-scale, complex infrastructure challenges. 

Now a staff of seven, Schroller and her colleagues manage a steady stream of projects, most notably design for TxDOT’s I-35 NEX, a $2 billion undertaking. And though they have other long-duration projects in the works with TxDOT, they are also setting their sights on the municipal world.

“Now that we have grown and my staff continues to develop in their careers, we are looking to open doors to other clients,” Schroller said. “That was our mission from the beginning – to impact this community that has meant so much to us.”

Schroller was familiar with Garver before walking through its doors in early 2018. As she continued to hear amazing things from colleagues who had migrated there, her interest was piqued.

“It was a much different perspective of a workplace to continue to grow my career,” she said. “Here was a firm offering the best employee experience, which was the environment I wanted to work in.”

From successfully delivering transportation projects that impact her family and neighbors, to giving back to the community and volunteering with the San Antonio Food Bank, or with the University of Texas at San Antonio College of Engineering and Integrated Design, it has been all she thought it would be and more.

“I was mostly drawn to the Garver culture, and now I want to model that here as we grow,” she said. “Garver wants us to connect, grow with purpose, and to go out in the community and do great things.”