11/20/2020
UIC College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs
Our next alum is MUPP Kara Komp!
Kara Komp had her sights set on urban planning from a young age. Growing up in Joliet, she would frequently visit Chicago with her family, soon coming to understand that her goal in life was to make a difference in the city that was formative in her upbringing.
“Even in high school, I asked myself, ‘What can I do to help the city?’” Komp says. “It was this very existential question: what career path could I take that could actually help the city that I love and that inspires me?”
Komp quickly realized that UIC would be a perfect fit for her undergraduate degree, allowing her both to study urban planning in a city context, as well as play Division I softball.
“A lot of kids grow up and don’t know what urban planning is or how it impacts our lives,” Komp says. “Once I discovered the field of planning, I had that laser focus going into undergrad at UIC knowing that, and because I also wanted to play softball and live in Chicago, the Venn diagram intersected really well.”
When Komp decided she wanted to pursue a master’s degree after finishing her undergraduate degree, CUPPA was the obvious choice for her. Describing herself as a “tangible person,” it only made sense to continue studying the city within the city itself, drawing daily upon the inspiration her surroundings presented her as she got deeper into the field.
“There is a very real relationship and almost an anchor of urban planning in the city context,” Komp says. “You learn more about the city just from living here, and you really get an understanding of what the problems are by pounding the pavement instead of just reading about them in books.”
In the MUPP program, Komp specialized in economic development and transportation planning. She says her goal was to understand what it takes to get projects paid for, knowing how often good plans fail to be implemented due to lack of funding. That led her to a Research Associate position at the Civic Federation, where she helped implement their good governance mission, and the Regional Transportation Agency (RTA), where she conducted ridership modeling and strategic planning. After graduation, her interests led her to a Policy Analyst position at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP), where she specialized in economic and transportation policy, and at SB Friedman Development Advisors, where she focused on value capture and development finance consulting.
Kara currently works at HNTB, a civil engineering firm, where she serves as Financial Planning Lead for the Chicago Transit Authority’s (CTA) Red Line Extension (RLE) project, a multibillion dollar equity project that will extend the Red Line south to 130th Street, a transformational change to the city’s transportation infrastructure.
In her role overseeing the RLE project, Komp wears many different hats. Though she’s not a civil engineer, she’s frequently in dialogue with those on staff who are solving design challenges posed by the project. She’s also figuring out ways to identify and secure funding sources for the project, itself a major challenge. Through it all, she’s drawn upon her experience in CUPPA, using her skills as a planner to manage many disciplines at once.
“What planners have to bring to the table is the big picture thinking and connecting the dots,” Komp says. “I find myself doing that on the day to day, leading a team of people from a lot of different backgrounds. It all falls into my court.”
Komp credits getting to study in Chicago as a defining quality of the lessons she learned about urban planning. From growing up visiting the city to studying its smallest details while riding the CTA, her love of the city has only grown, as she’s been able to carry out her childhood dreams of making it a better place.
“It's the real-world experience that stood out to me about UIC, this very ‘choose your own adventure’ dynamic of being here,” Komp says. “If you want to learn about the city, you need to be here, where you're going to have an easier time moving beyond the just the academic or the theoretical into getting things done.”
