Coleman Froehlke said his experience in the RailTEC program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has been one of personal growth and a newfound interest in transportation engineering. The Boise, Idaho, native earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering with a focus on geotechnical engineering from Illinois in 2023 and expects to graduate in December 2025 with a master’s degree in civil engineering with a focus on transportation engineering. “I had options to stay in the West, but I have a relative who is a physics professor here,” he said.
Although Froehlke admits he misses the mountains of the West, the friendly people in Central Illinois more than make up for the area’s lack of scenery and bitter winters. “The winters are harsher here. Boise has more of a desert climate,” Coleman said. “But the people are nice here.” 
An internship building dams and doing geotechnical work in the energy division of Stantec, an international civil engineering consulting firm, prompted Froehlke to consider pursuing a master’s degree to improve his future job opportunities. “I was finishing up my undergrad here in fall 2023, and I was thinking about getting a job here, but a lot of jobs required an MS,” he said. One of Froehlke’s professors knew RailTEC Senior Principal Research Engineer Marcus Dersch because the two were pursuing a PhD at the same time. “He knew Marcus was working on a frozen ballast project,” Froehlke said. “As an undergrad, I didn’t have a lot of experience with transportation, but the project had other aspects I was interested in, such as laboratory testing.”
Since joining RailTEC in spring 2024, Froehlke has had the opportunity to work on a research project in Joliet about how frozen ballast affects rail destressing. “It’s not necessarily freezing temperatures,” he said. “We investigate how ballast is degraded or not degraded, if moisture is present, and how a combination of those conditions can change the properties of ballast. “I do the laboratory testing and evaluate the data to compare the behavior of different testing conditions,” Froehlke explained.
RailTEC also has provided Froehlke the opportunity to attend conferences, including the Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) annual meeting in January in Washington, DC, where he gave a presentation on “Effect of Sub-Freezing Temperature on Ballast Strength.” “I am excited to go to conferences and learn about research that is being done,” he said. “Presenting at TRB is a memory I’ll remember for a while,” he said. “Presenting research is a good exercise and helps me build my confidence with public speaking.”
Froehlke said he enjoys working on research with the RailTEC team and is now considering furthering his education at Illinois. “It is very rare that people in other research groups are as close as we are in RailTEC,” he said. “I am still considering pursuing a PhD and seeing what other opportunities are out there.”