Hamidou Sy always knew he wanted to be a civil engineer, even before he understood what engineering was. As a child growing up in Mauritania in West Africa, Sy saw the impact of a lack of engineering firsthand.
“Whenever we would travel from province to province, state to state, we would see terrible accidents on the roadway. We would see bad infrastructure, inadequate water resources,” Sy recalled. “That was a call to action for me.”
As a new 2023 graduate of The Ohio State University with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering, Sy has answered that call. His road to success, however, was not without obstacles.
After immigrating to the United States from Mauritania in February 2005, Sy began his path to Ohio State as a middle school student in Columbus Public Schools, where he was part of the TriO Upper Bound Program, Law and Leadership Institute, and Young Scholars Program. Those experiences led him to follow in his older brothers' footsteps and become a Buckeye. Sy entered the university as a civil engineering major but soon encountered challenges as he struggled to adapt.
“My first two semesters at Ohio State, I had faced a lot of adversity with civil engineering. I got to a point where I was so discouraged, I told myself I wanted to dive away from this major and go somewhere else, so I transitioned over to architecture,” Sy said. “I performed very well, had good grades, but I always asked myself, ‘Do I belong here? Do I like the work I am doing?'”
With the help of Dr. Edwin Lee, Assistant Director of the Ohio State College of Engineering Community, Access, Retention, and Empowerment (CARE) Office, Sy was able to transition back to civil engineering, making use of Ohio State's vast wealth of resources, particularly the weekly tutoring offered by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
“This achievement is not just dedicated to me, but also the whole host of resources I had at Ohio State,” Sy stated.
Since his return to engineering, Sy has earned four internships and several academic scholarships, including the national Benjamin A. Gilman Award, which allowed him to study abroad in Guyana, Puerto Rico, and Guatemala, where he helped design infrastructure to support local populations.
Among these projects, Sy is most proud of a specialized solar panel that he and a team of engineers developed in Guyana to generate and store electricity for a rural community. Throughout the course of a semester, Sy and his team worked to research and understand the community's needs, devise and build a prototype, and eventually present the finished product.
“As soon as the sun goes down, they would have no source of power to turn on the lights,” Sy explained. “To give them that sense of generating electricity was really cool.”
After earning his degree, the next stop on Sy's journey is a full-time civil engineering job at Woolpert Engineering in Columbus; however, he said he will always call Ohio State, and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion specifically, his home.
“There are so many different individuals from so many different races, religions, cultures, and ethnic backgrounds, but at the end of the day, we all bleed Scarlet and Gray,” Sy noted. “Whenever I came into Hale Hall, I would always see a majority of African Americans, people like me, and I would always feel at home.”
He encourages students entering the university to not be afraid to step outside of their comfort zone, ask tough questions, and challenge themselves.
“Don't be afraid because you have everything at the tip of your fingertips,” Sy said. “You have all the resources in the world, especially at Ohio State.”