How can I get into an operations research career in the construction industry?

I am a college sophomore now majoring in civil engineering, and by the end of this summer I would have completed 4 summer internships: 2 in construction project engineering/general contracting, and 2 in civil engineering research (specifically in environmental engineering/water resources and structural engineering). While making plans and ideas for my academic and professional goals for next year and in the future, I reflected on my interests and passion for this field and how they changed over time. I find myself deeply committed to the construction industry in general, and definitely want to pursue my career in it after graduating college. At the same time, I have a variety of interests that overlap each other, and I am wondering how I should go about integrating them in my long-term professional life. So that got me to thinking about operations research as an option; I would like to immerse myself in both STEM and management of construction, in a data-driven environment that benefits and merges academia and industry, as previous research studies have done before. However, I don't know how I should proceed about this seemingly abstract goal, and my online research so far points to no summer opportunities, whether in academic research or industrial research, for a civil engineering undergraduate to apply their education and/or expand on it, within an operations research context. What should be my next step then? I am also aware, that currently operations research is much more oftenly associated with applied mathematics, computer science, physics, and business/economics than construction, per say. Overall, with my hopes in operations research, I don't think I've strayed away from my passion in civil engineering and construction, but rather that I use them in an innovative position that reflects society's needs, similar to the concept of supply and demand in terms of employment opportunities. #civil-engineering #STEM #datascience #management #operations-research #construction #construction-management #construction-engineering #research #engineering #internships

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