AESI - AESI President In The News

		AESI President In The News Wilford Sheng Featured in MD Daily Record Immigrant discovers freedom to succeed on his own February 6, 2004 By SOFIA KOSMETATOS, MD Daily Record Business Writer When Hagerstown businessman Wilford Sheng arrived in the United States from China in 1979, he was 28 years old and spoke very little English. His life in Shanghai until then had been dictated by the repressive Chinese government. After high school, he was assigned to work as a ship welder for eight years. Then he was sent to college, where he was told to study electrical engineering. Things changed after President Carter’s historic trip to China in 1978. The borders between the United States and China opened, and Sheng saw a way out. He applied for a student visa to Ohio University, where his uncle was an associate professor. Nine months later, newly married and with a visa in hand, he and his wife arrived in the United States. “We had to wait a long time,” Sheng said. But the wait was worth it. In the states, “I can do anything I want. I can choose my own career. I can speak freely,” he said. Today, Sheng is the president of Associated Engineering Sciences, Inc., a civil engineering consulting firm in the heart of Hagerstown. The company has been tapped to design the second of 13 Library of Congress storage buildings that will be built on Fort Meade as part of the library’s 20-year project to build off-site housing for its collections. While the building will only be 14,000 square feet, its significance to AESI is great. “To be able to do a project that is of significance makes a small firm like ours more than proud,” said Marketing Director Tom Riford. He said he hopes it will open the door to other federal government projects. The first building, which opened in 2002, drew controversy from the Fort Meade Restoration Advisory Board for not fitting in with the traditional look of the base. AESI will not be designing the façade for the new building. AESI designs and surveys buildings, bridges and roadways and manages construction projects in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio. With only 19 employees, Sheng acknowledges his firm is small. But it has been awarded significant contracts, including one by Washington County to design the longest county-owned bridge in Western Maryland — a 620-foot concrete and steel span completed in 2000 that runs over the Conococheague Creek from U.S. 40 to the Washington County landfill. Other projects include designing a 40,000-square-foot facility, including six satellite dish towers, for Intelsat, a telecommunications company which recently began operating near Hagerstown, and designing fly ash silos for a Chinese company. On the drawing board is a 2,200-space parking garage for the Pittsburgh Port Authority and a major hospital expansion in Ohio. For Sheng, these projects are a long way from his first months in America, when he barely spoke English. He spent most of the first quarter of his studies at Ohio University studying the language. After graduating in 1982, he worked as a project engineer for Marietta Structures Corp., a precast concrete construction company in Ohio. In 1988, wanting to gain more experience in different types of construction, Sheng moved to AESI, then called Oliver Co., after earning a master of science degree in structural engineering. When he was hired, Sheng said founder and owner Julian Oliver told him he planned to retire in several years and that he would hand the company over to the engineer that he trusted the most. Ten years later, senior engineers and friends Sheng and Richard Reichenbaugh, who is an AESI vice president, bought the company from Oliver. They had been managing the company prior to that, and owning the company “just seemed to make more sense,” Reichenbaugh said. The arrangement works well. Sheng handles structural projects and Reichenbaugh, whose experience includes working on the city of Chicago’s underground reservoir, is in charge of civil engineering projects and land surveying. Sheng’s commitment to his job and to his community is obvious, said Riford. He rolls up his sleeves as the main engineer on many structural engineering projects. And even though he lives 50 miles away in Germantown, “he’s always here early, in all kinds of weather,” said Riford. “[W]e admire Wilford for being able to accomplish so much in his life,” said Riford. “Being able to leave Communist China and be so successful here is really a true American success story.” Wilford Sheng, president of Associated Engineering Sciences Inc., says his firm may be small but it completed the longest county-owned bridge in Western Maryland — a 620-foot concrete and steel span that runs over the Conococheague Creek from U.S. 40 to the Washington County landfill. USED BY PERMISSION: Copyright 2004 © The Daily Record. All Rights Reserved. << back to news