You could say that from an early age Ed Vazquez, a George Mason University senior majoring in civil engineering, was destined to work on big construction projects. His father, who relocated their family here from Mexico in 2001, has for years built Inova Health Systems facilities and frequently tinkered around the house with Ed at his side. They even built a backyard shed together, from the foundation up.
Vazquez will be dealing with something slightly more complex than a shed when he graduates in May, landing the position of Project Engineer with Hoar Construction just as they break ground on Mason's new Community, Music, and Wellbeing Center, a 25,000-square-foot structure that will host practices for ‘The Green Machine’ and house recreational athletic activities, among serving other purposes.
Vazquez planned to attend Mason from the time he was placed in the university’s Early Identification Program, which prepares students who will be the first in their families to attend college. As part of the program he received a full-ride scholarship to be in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, where he studied for a brief time before transferring to engineering. Vazquez is here under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, a status which leaves him unable to receive public financial aid. The decision to move to engineering and sacrifice his scholarship, thus, was significant in that he would have to fund his education out of his own pocket, something he determined was a worthwhile price for pursuing his passion.
And last fall that decision paid off. Vazquez was attending his first-ever career fair in Dewberry Hall and wandered to the very back of the room, where he saw the Hoar Construction booth just as he was ready to leave. He said, “I’m pretty knowledgeable about the contractors around here because of my dad’s work and I’d never heard of them but stopped anyway. The vice president was there, which is something you don’t get with the bigger companies. I got along with them right off the bat and left my resume.”
He interned there in the summer of 2023 and made a good enough impression to get a job offer. It didn’t hurt that the company was hoping to secure a contract with the university. “At one point they asked me if I had a picture I could give them,” he said. “They said we they were bidding on a project for Mason. It was their first university project and they wanted to make sure Mason knew they had one of their students on the team.”
Vazquez is excited to work on the project. He says it will be the first tensile-fabric structure built by the university and, rumor has it, it will be the first building on campus to have the new Mason logo. He imagines bringing his own children to campus someday and being able to point to the structure and say, “I helped build that.”
It will be a lasting legacy…one started by his immigrant father putting up drywall day after day so his children could enjoy the American dream.