Meet the CNM Grad Who Brought the Rail Yards to Life

Every day, thousands of people use, climb, sit in, or walk through projects that Adriana Casas has overseen as a project manager with the CNM Physical Plant. Her first project was replacing swollen doors at Smith Brasher Hall. She eventually moved onto overseeing the Student Resource Center (SRC) plaza redesign, and she’s now completing her biggest project yet: the restoration of the historic Rail Yards building that will house CNM’s Film and Digital Media program along with the New Mexico Media Arts Collective. 

As a CNM grad herself, Adriana says she loves creating comfortable, well-designed, and cutting-edge spaces where instructors can teach and students can learn and thrive. 

“I get to create spaces where students can learn and start building the foundations for their futures,” she says. “There’s something really rewarding about knowing that the work I do becomes part of someone else’s education and, ultimately, their career.” 

Adriana started her education in UNM’s Architecture program before transferring to CNM’s Architecture Engineering Construction Modeling and Documentation Technology program. While attending CNM, she worked with the Physical Plant Department (PPD) as a work-study and then graduated in 2013. Next, she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Architecture at UNM while progressing at CNM from a part-time CAD technician to associate project manager and ultimately to senior project manager. 

The Rail Yards has been a seven-year project and certainly the biggest of her career. As project manager, she had multiple responsibilities, but says the most important was acting as the liaison between CNM, the City of Albuquerque, and the State of New Mexico, which all had a stake in the restoration. 

In her day-to-day work, she managed and tracked everything from the design process through construction. She was a key part of planning, budgeting, construction, design changes, and the grand opening. Along the way, she learned a lot about everything from historical restoration to sound acoustics and kept comprehensive spreadsheets to ensure everything was on track. 

“I love spreadsheets,” she says. “Spreadsheets are the only way project managers can get through a project.”  

As you might expect, there were plenty of setbacks. The construction team found heaps of old construction materials and concrete buried under the Rail Yards that had to be dug up and disposed of, which took a lot of extra time. Then the roof collapsed on the paint booth, the section where workers used to paint locomotives. 

“I used to have nightmares about the paint booth because there was so much uncertainty and so many unknowns,” Adriana says.  

Everything was eventually handled or fixed and the grand opening was a smashing success, with hundreds of people in attendance. Classes have since started, but Adriana’s job isn’t over. Right now, she’s finishing what’s called the closeout period where her team is finding and fixing kinks and minor issues that need to be corrected.  That should be wrapped up sometime in October. 

Then come the next projects, some of which have already started. She’s currently overseeing a safety project where campus fire alarms are being replaced and the voice evacuation system is being updated. At the SRC she’s in charge of the chiller replacement.  

Adriana eventually sees herself in an even greater leadership role but tries to always remember where she came from. She credits CNM with helping her not only find a career but also a community, and she wants to see CNM continue to grow and succeed. 

“CNM allowed me to put down roots, and I’ll always remember that,” she says.