AT LEAST ONCE A YEAR, maybe a couple of times of year, a few of the team members from Tucker Paving get together for a trek up to the University of Florida in Gainesville. No, it’s not for a football or basketball game. It’s all business — the business of recruiting top talent for our company.

Tucker Paving is a fixture in the Stephen C. O’Connell Center — the O’Dome — for career fairs organized by UF’s M.E. Rinker, Sr., School of Construction Management. Most recently, our team was at UF for a Sept. 22 Rinker career fair. Before that, there was a Rinker career fair in February.

The Rinker School of Construction Management, part of UF’s College of Design, Construction and Planning, is one of the finest construction schools in the nation. Started in 1935 as the Building Construction (BCN) program under the Department of Architecture, the school is the oldest continuing building construction program in the country. The school prepares students for careers in the construction industry, and it prepares them well. That’s why our managers attend the Rinker career fairs — to snag some of the best and brightest soon-to-be UF graduates to work at Tucker Paving and contribute to the already-great talent pool we have here.

It’s always interesting to learn the names behind buildings and institutions. You might be interested to know that the Rinker School of Construction Management is named for Indiana-born Marshall Edition “Doc” Rinker, Sr., the founder (in 1926) of the highly successful Rinker Materials Corporation in Palm Beach County and noted philanthropist. He was a very generous contributor to UF and many other schools and organizations throughout Florida.

The Rinker School offers undergraduate, master’s, and doctorate degrees in Construction Management; ndergraduate and master’s degrees in Fire and Emergency Services; and a master’s degree in International Construction Management.

You can learn more about the M.E. Rinker, Sr., School of Construction Management — perhaps you, too, have a youngster who wants to be a Gator builder — by clicking over to https://dcp.ufl.edu/rinker/.