Departments — May/June 2007

AGC’s Educator of the Year: Larry Cormicle of Iowa State University

After a long industry career, Iowa native finds his passion in teaching

Jerry W. Cormicle Senior Lecturer Construction Engineering Curriculum Dept. of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering Iowa State University Ames, Iowa Age: 52 Education Construction Engineering Iowa State University, 1978 Teaching Experience > Senior Lecturer Iowa State University, 2002 > Adjunct Instructor Construction Technology Triton College, River Grove, Ill. Industry Experience > Senior Project Manager Walsh Construction Co., Chicago, Ill. > Senior Project Manager Pepper Construction Co. Barrington, Ill. > Senior Construction Manager Stein & Co., Chicago > Senior Construction Manager Homart Development Co., Chicago Email: cormicle@iastate.edu

Larry Cormicle has been a senior lecturer in construction engineering at Iowa State University in Ames since 2002. This spring, AGC of America honored him with its 2007 Outstanding Educator Award at its national convention in San Antonio.

Constructor: You spent more than 24 years working for several construction firms in various roles, from project superintendent and project manager to senior construction manager. That by itself sounds like a pretty full career. Why become a teacher after all of that?
Cormicle: I did have a long and happy career working for some very good construction and real estate firms, which kept me pretty busy, so I didn’t set out to make a career out of teaching. For many years, I had been mentoring and training young employees in the companies I worked for, and I’d gotten good feedback about that.
Part of my original motivation for teaching was to become a better presenter and public speaker. I started teaching a couple of nights a week while working full time during the day in the industry. I did that for 111⁄2 years.
Then my first wife died in 1997 after a long, 10-year illness and I went through a life crisis in my late 30s, what most people go through much later on. I needed a change and I realized that I was looking forward more to my night job than my day job. I finally listened to those people who told me I was good in the classroom, and I made the leap to full-time teaching. Now I realize that teaching is one of the greatest passions of my life.

Constructor: Can you describe your teaching schedule as a full-time university lecturer?
Cormicle: I teach around three courses a semester, ranging from sophomores to seniors. That includes a class in construction organization and management, a junior-level course in heavy-construction methods and equipment, and a senior-level class in construction scheduling, planning, cost management and controls. Plus, there’s our senior capstone course in project delivery, including design-build, and we’re adding a BIM [building information modeling] component this fall. It adds up to about 150 students a semester, on average.

Constructor: What’s your role as a teacher?
Cormicle: My job is to lead others to become great leaders. I provide my students with the skills to lead and succeed, but it’s not on-the-job training. That’s what internships are for.
It’s partly Socratic in nature. I usually answer questions with a question: Have you considered this? What about doing it this way? Have you thought about that possibility? Then they make up their own minds on which direction to go.

Constructor: What’s the biggest mistake a teacher can make?
Cormicle: It’s thinking they know a lot more than their students. Teachers should let their experience and problem-solving skills emerge and not be so prescriptive. They should do some lecturing, offer examples and stories, model thought processes and assign lots of homework. That allows the students to become the resource, not them.

Constructor: What have been some of the high points of your teaching career?
Cormicle: Well, this award is certainly nice, but I think the high points have come from my students’ successes. Iowa State’s design-build team took third place in the ASC/AGC national student design-build competition this year and we’ve had nine different teams that made it to the national finals of the student competition in the last five years.
We also have the largest construction engineering enrollment in the country, at 360 students. It’s the second-oldest construction engineering program in the U.S.

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