By Brian Wright O’Connor
- Suffolk Construction Brings Them Together
Two close friends, one from the Amazon rain forest and the other from the mango capital of the Dominican Republic, both came to Boston at age 12 to seek education and opportunity.
The shy teens, bookish and smart, met through a Jamaica Plain youth program, stayed in touch through high school and college and are now even closer friends and colleagues at Suffolk Construction.
The journey of the 25-year-old immigrant besties to burgeoning careers in the male-dominated construction industry, while highly unusual, is a testament to their hard work, self-belief and opportunities offered through Suffolk, one of the nation’s top 20 construction firms, to diversify the field.
Caroline Gomes and Jhadley Sanchez, bright and talkative, sat for a recent interview in the Suffolk mothership located in a six-story brick-and-glass building off Newmarket Square in Roxbury. Both dressed in casual hip – Gomes in a black leather jacket and large hoop earrings and Sanchez in a black turtleneck and high-top Chuck Taylors – they chatted fluently in the language of construction design and logistics while sitting at the end of a 20-foot conference table in a room labeled “Mission Control.”
Gomes, raised on a farm without paved roads or mail service in Rondonia in the Brazilian rain forest, moved to a Sao Paolo favela when her parents split and left for Boston after her mother remarried, arriving on Christmas Day.
Sanchez grew up in a Bani, a coastal town west of the capital Santo Domingo, among cattle farms, mango and plaintain fields, and moved to the South End with her family.
Both struggled at first with English but flourished in school. For Gomes, whose favela education came in a system where students attended classes in three shifts, access to books was a godsend.
“I’ve always been a big nerd,” said Gomes, speaking beneath a huge monitor with color-coded construction design elements for one of her current projects. “But getting an education where we were in Brazil was really, really difficult. And my mom’s dream was always for us to be able to go to college because no one in my family had ever gone.” Gomes successfully auditioned in theater to attend Boston Academy of the Arts and then earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in conflict resolution in four years at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Sanchez, equally studious, attended Boston Community Leadership Academy in Hyde Park and earned a civil engineering degree at Northeastern. She was the first of the pair to land at Suffolk through the Northeastern co-op program and then after graduation in the two-year Career Start initiative.
But her interest in construction first showed itself in middle-school, when she entered a project in a science fair.
“I picked building bridges – bridges that could support the heaviest possible load,” said Sanchez. “The idea came from where I grew up in the Dominican Republic and seeing that we did not have the most reliable infrastructure. And not just bridges. When storms came, they would be inside your home. So that drove me to know that I wanted to build.”
Exposure to the various domains of construction during her Suffolk co-op led Sanchez to focus on what she really wanted to do in the industry. “Engineering is not really building the buildings, it’s more like designing them, and I wanted to build them,” she said. “And so that’s what I came to focus on.”
Sanchez’s signature Career Start experience came during a rotation as a project manager on the $305 million Boston University Center for Computing & Data Services building, a striking 19-story stacked structure made of exposed steel, rust-covered aluminum panels and sheets of transparent and reflective glass. The building, designed by KPMB, has altered the skyline along the Charles River while its soaring atrium and butterfly stairway rising from the first to the fifth floors has become a campus favorite among students.
Sanchez was one of eight project managers on site. She oversaw the ordering and delivery of structural glass, concrete and landscaping supplies. When her stint at Career Start ended, she stayed on as a full-time employee and assistant superintendent.
Meanwhile Gomes, thinking about law school, had interned at a major downtown firm and worked at Apple in Cambridge but remained uncertain about long-term career goals.
“So I was sharing all these thoughts with my bestie,” said Gomes, “and Jhadley had this wild idea. She said, ‘Honestly, you should apply for the Career Start program.’ I read the fine print. They don’t require you to study engineering. And I thought, ‘Well, maybe you can do this.’”
Joining Suffolk in July 2022, Gomes started off in commercial estimating and shifted to project management for the expansion of Gillette Stadium with an iconic lighthouse as the centerpiece of the remodeling. A football fan, she is less interested in the kind played by the Patriots than by her favorite Brazilian soccer team – the Corinthians – and looks forward to seeing World Cup matches played in Foxborough when the global tournament comes to North America in 2026.
After helping with final inspections at Gillette, Gomes landed on the digital engineering team. She pointed to the wall monitor and its colorful array of ducts, wires and pipes – the organs of construction. “What you see up there are designs for Lowell High School – 3D designs showing the mechanical, electrical and plumbing work all drafted to size and scale.” Lowell High, she added, is one of about 10 projects she’s working on currently.
Once her Career Start stint ends in July, Gomes isn’t certain where she’ll end up but is exploring virtual design construction as the next frontier of digital design. “We’ll see if I’m offered a job after July,” she said with a smile. “I’ll keep you posted.”
Over the last three years, Suffolk has increased the hiring of professionals of color by 24% and promotions to leadership roles by 58%, according to company-provided statistics.
Over the same period, employment of women at Suffolk has risen by 12% and women in leadership roles by 55%. That’s out of about 3,000 employees working for Suffolk, which last year earned $5.7 billion in revenues.
Gomes and Sanchez both said their Suffolk experience has helped them become more outgoing and collegial. They work together but frequently travel together as well, their most recent vacation taking them to the beaches and rain forests of Costa Rica.
“We’re finally making some adult income,” said Gomes, “and taking advantage of it.”
