Sarah Taliaferro

Project Manager, Chevron

Project Manager| Chevron

What I Do

I am currently a Project Manager at a refinery. I manage projects and teams that execute the work on the projects. A project is defined as anything with a budget of greater than $2,000,000 (there's more to this). An example is replacing a cooling water tower.
Why Engineering?

I chose engineering because I always enjoyed understanding how things worked. And I was good at it. I enjoy building things, solving problems and using my intellectual creativity to find solutions.
School Days

I attended high school in Virginia. I started and finished college at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont CA with a degree in General Engineering – this is a Mechanical degree with lots of engineering electives. I chose HMC for its small atmosphere and notoriously challenging academics.
My Day At Work

I do a lot of emails, meetings, and putting together documentation.
Best Part

Seeing my projects built. Bonding with coworkers.
Proud Moments

Giving a presentation to our facility's management team. See challenges for why!
Challenges

I have met many challenges. This is a male dominated field. Being heard, seen and valued is always a challenge. I have social anxiety that prevents me from public speaking or expressing myself clearly and concisely. I have been on a lifelong journey to improve this. There is help for everything, get is as soon as you can!
My Family

My parents live in two different sides of the country. My sister lives in Europe. I live here with my two cats and chosen family.
Dreams and Goals

Be a mom. Live in Europe.
Inspiration

My Odyssey of the Mind Coach. My uncle. My teachers.
Want to be an Engineer?

Being technically competent alone does not make an engineer. The best engineers can communicate with their audience on their level, make their thinking clear, and get the right work done the right way.
Hobbies

I like to backcountry ski and snow camp. I garden quite a bit and do home repair projects. I road bike, jog and swim. I'm on the board for the Women's Northern CA Field Hockey Association (NCFHA) and help run the league. I go on trips to spend time with family and college friends. I love to travel outside the US.

Previous Roles in this Career:
– Reliability Engineer: Track budding plant issues. Facilitate investigations into equipment failures. Run Reliability programs. Explore maintenance and reliability issues using data.
– Rotating Equipment Engineer. I supported pumps, compressors, fans and turbines. I created repair plans, worked with machinists, investigated failures, troubleshot issues and explored the operational range of the equipment.
– Design Engineer. I created plans to repair fixed equipment such as pipes, vessels, columns and tanks. This involved calculations, creating drawings, working with field experts, welders, foremen, and managers.

Previous Careers: HVAC Engineer (Heating, Ventilation, AC). I designed HVAC systems for buildings, ensured code compliance and created models for energy consumption. And way-way before that I was a software engineer in India.

Education: I attended Harvey Mudd College (HMC) in Claremont, CA, studying General Engineering – this is a Mechanical degree with lots of engineering electives. I chose HMC for its small atmosphere and notoriously challenging academics. I have my PE (Professional Engineering) License in Mechanical Engineering. I took all the AP classes I could get into at my high school (except two – I couldn’t get into those) and I even took some advanced classes at a joint county school that were not offered by my high school in Virginia.

Early Years: When In grade school I really loved tinkering, building and problem solving. I got into trouble (and shocked!) taking apart the family toaster. Outside of sports my main extracurricular was Odyssey of the Mind. I worked on a team to solve a long-term project and sharpen my off-the-cuff problem-solving skills. We competed against teams from other schools showcasing our solutions and competing in fast and creative problem solving. I ended up going to the world finals four times, champions three times!