The Walsh Group Director of Internships leads prestigious program

In 1972, a group of industry representatives contacted the Indiana Commission for Higher Education with a request to develop a new professional level engineering program tailored to the needs of the construction industry. As a result, Purdue University established its construction engineering program in 1976.

Experiential learning has been a foundation of a Purdue degree in construction engineering for nearly 50 years. Faculty and industry experts agreed that internship experiences were critical to preparing workforce-ready construction engineers. Today, completing three paid 12-week internships is a required component of the construction engineering curriculum.

To bolster the visibility of the internship program and reinforce its essential purpose, Chicago-based The Walsh Group, one of the largest and most established builders in North America, created an endowment to establish The Walsh Group Director of Internships position, which was ratified by the Purdue Board of Trustees in 2019. The Walsh Group, a fourth-generation construction company, has a long history of supporting the construction engineering program.

“The Walsh Group was introduced to the Purdue civil and construction engineering program in 1983 with an invitation from Daniel Halpin, then head of the Division of Construction Engineering, to sponsor internships,” said Dan Walsh, co-chair of the Walsh Group. “Over the past 40 years, Walsh has been blessed with dozens of excellent Purdue interns as well as hundreds of Purdue graduate employees. Walsh was honored to endow the position of The Walsh Group Director of Internships, which in our opinion is the finest internship program in the country. We are forever grateful for a succession of outstanding internship directors from Lloyd Jones, Donn Hancher, Bob Tener and especially the current director, Brandon Fulk.”

Fulk (BSCNE ’98, MSCE ’22) joined the construction and engineering management faculty in 2010 as director of internships. Now The Walsh Group Director of Internships within the Lyles School of Civil and Construction Engineering, Fulk and his team connect students with experiential learning opportunities available through hundreds of industry partners.

Because of the time Fulk and other members of the construction engineering team dedicate to meeting with and learning about individual students, they’re able to collaborate with representatives from partner companies to create assignments that align with a student’s aptitudes, attitudes and goals as well as the needs and corporate culture of the firm. The students benefit from this level of diligent assessment.

“I’ve noticed a tremendous transformation in confidence in students after their first internship,” Fulk said. “They gain confidence in themselves, in their voice and in their actions. They return to the classroom confident that they can make a difference somewhere after being immersed in a professional company culture with a structure of supervision and mentors.”

The Walsh Group endowment gives Fulk the flexibility to adapt programming based on current needs and objectives, always with the goal of enhancing the student experience.

Historically, students have preferred to complete all three curriculum required internships with the same company. The robust internship program contributes to construction engineering’s 100% job placement rate which has been maintained since the first graduating class in 1979. Fulk credits the support and encouragement of industry partners, many of which have maintained a decades-long relationship with the university, as the primary reason for the program’s sustained success. Other innovative experiential learning opportunities include community-based project builds and one-on-one research with faculty members.

“In the classroom, students can gain the technical competence necessary to do the job and internships help reinforce those technical skills,” Fulk said. “But it’s the curriculum-based experiential learning component that fosters the development of professional skills necessary to succeed in the workplace.”