Scott R. Schork (’87, Civil Engineering)

Principal/Vice President, BKF Engineers

 BS Civil Engineering, Cal Poly Pomona, 1987

For as long as Scott Schork could remember, he loved the idea of creating spaces where people lived and thrived. He even dreamt of building his own house, but while that didn’t come to pass, pursuing a civil engineering degree at Cal Poly Pomona was the closest he could get without physically slinging the hammer. So, the teenager from the Bay Area came down south to earn a degree.

Schork came into college with a strong work ethic. He lost his father when he was nine years old, and his mother cared and supported both him and his two older siblings without complaint. “I developed similar work ethics and characteristics,” Schork says. “I wasn’t a quick read so studying significantly longer than others was often necessary to maintain a respectable GPA.”

After graduation, he started as a junior engineer at a private consulting firm, Ruth & Going, with a focus on the transportation sector. Three years later he joined another Bay Area consulting firm, Brian Kangas Foulk, now known as BKF Engineers.

35 years later, he’s still there and it’s paid off dividends. Starting as an engineer, he’s now a majority principal and vice president of the company. Throughout the decades, he worked hard and rarely complained, just like his mother. He took risks, always came prepared and put in the extra hours to stand out from the pack.

Since he started at BKF, he’s seen the firm grow from 150 employees in the Bay Area to a peak of 550 across California and Portland. And to this day, his favorite engineering projects are designing residential subdivisions.