Leaving the meeting, he knew he had secured everything he asked for from a room of engineers. When an amazed colleague asked how he did it, he knew he could refer to his pair of undergraduate degrees.
Are his degrees in engineering and business management? Actually, it’s an alum with degrees in civil engineering and political science.
Brad Tune graduated from the University of South Carolina in 2002 with a degree in political science and aspirations to attend law school. But two years later, he decided to follow a civil engineering career path.
“I never really loved politics, but I liked policy, particularly international relations, where I drove my focus at South Carolina,” Tune says.
He worked as a runner at a law firm as an undergraduate, but after losing interest in attending law school, he decided to enter the workforce. Unfortunately, he struggled to find work in South Carolina during an economic downturn.
With his main interests in policy, Tune volunteered with the South Carolina Policy Council (SCPC), but the organization did not have the funding to hire him. In the meantime, he accepted an apprenticeship framing houses. It was a decision that eventually led to his current career field.
Tune shifted away from framing to work as a marketing representative for Cydcor while writing opinion pieces for SCPC. Honing his physical skills on the side through tile work and framing never came to fruition, but his engineering career would never have happened without his carpentry ambitions.
“I was studying to get my contractor's license and a friend of mine, who was a USC orientation leader with me, was getting his master’s in civil engineering there,” Tune says. “He said, ‘Why go get your contractor's license? You’ve already got a degree, just go back and get an engineering degree.’”
After thinking it over with his wife, Tune took his friend’s advice and returned to USC in 2004 to study civil engineering, with a focus on structural engineering.
“I didn't think I could do it because I wasn’t great at math in high school and didn't have the confidence,” Tune says. “But once I started, I loved it and was surprisingly good at math.”
In addition to his classes, Tune ran the structures lab for the civil engineering department, performed testing and built setups for graduate students.
“I love being able to build stuff,” Tune says. “I still have a picture in my office of a self-consolidating concrete [SCC], pre-stressed girder that we poured in Savannah, Georgia, and tested in the lab. It’s a talking point that I've carried with me throughout my career.”
Tune graduated with his second bachelor’s degree in 2007 and began looking for engineering jobs.
“An opportunity came up as I was finishing my degree,” Tune says. “A connection hooked me up with a contact at South Carolina Electric and Gas (SCANA) to work on the twin AP1000 construction project in Jenkinsville [South Carolina]. That was a civil engineer's dream because everything that you could think of in civil engineering was in that project.”
The project included heavy earthwork, roadway and bridge construction, railway design and installation, and technologies such as SCC and welding. Tune oversaw the construction of a first of a kind A-framed ring derrick. At the time, the Bigge 125D derrick was the largest land-based crane of its kind and was designed to construct the twin AP1000 construction site. Tune worked on the project until its cancellation on Aug. 1, 2017.
After working at SCANA for almost a decade, Tune again used his connections to find his next job with Bechtel in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 2017. Bechtel was contracted by the National Nuclear Security Administration to construct a new Uranium Processing Facility to replace the original 1940s facility that was built to support the Manhattan Project.
“I jumped from one large mega-project to another, which again included heavy construction, tower cranes, concrete and earthwork,” Tune says. “It was an easy transition for me.”
Tune worked his way up from a concrete field engineer to designing throughputs for modular construction. He later worked as a deputy lead civil field engineer, lead civil field engineer and an area field engineer in his over five years at Bechtel.
Tune also finally applied his political science degree with engineering experience as a concrete subject matter expert.
“I learned to use the other side of my brain that geared me towards relationship building and problem mitigation,” Tune says. “I had to build my case to reinforce arguments to implement the changes that needed to be made,” Tune says. “That helped advance the project and save costs.”
In 2022, Tune moved on to Amentum-led United Cleanup Oak Ridge (UCOR), the lead environmental cleanup contractor for the Department of Energy on the Oak Ridge Reservation (ORR). The company’s mission is to clean up legacy Manhattan Project era nuclear facilities that were built to support reindustrialization. It has also started enabling new nuclear renaissance development and supporting national demands to increase energy and AI infrastructure.
Tune manages program integration and a construction management organization that oversees subcontracted work. He also oversees an infrastructure group that manages small construction projects and a team that is conducting scope closure work at the East Tennessee Technology Park, which was the site of the first cleanup of a gaseous-diffusion plant that UCOR completed in 2020.
“Every job I've had has been nuclear-related, but they have always been from a civil engineering standpoint," Tune says.
Through his academic and professional journeys, Tune combined his passions for policy and building.
“It's been a great journey to go from political science to civil engineering,” Tune says. While earning my political science degree, I would have never thought I would be where I am today; but I've enjoyed every minute.”