T.F. Chen

When looking for colleges several years ago, T.F. Chen, B.S. Urban Tech ’25, was excited by a brand new degree he’d learned about at the University of Michigan, one that focused on planning and designing for technologically advanced cities. He was also accepted to a traditional architecture and planning program in his home country of Canada, but it didn’t feel like the right fit for him. His heart was set on Urban Technology.

“As someone who is very enthusiastic about cities and who wants to be more involved in designing and planning for cities and the capabilities of handling these new urban systems that are emerging, I decided to bet on this program and come to Michigan,” Chen says.

That bet paid off; Chen started working in his dream field for a transportation consulting firm in San Francisco after graduation. Like others from his inaugural graduating cohort, he learned to work through the ambiguity of studying an emerging discipline and appreciates the strong bonds developed along the way. 

“It’s almost like we were all creating this curriculum together, even as students, helping the faculty shape it for future cohorts through feedback about the classes, the trips we took, the career opportunities we were exposed to,” Chen says.

Ever since he was a kid, Chen has been fascinated with cities and transportation.

“I used to draw fantasy maps and imagine what cities would look like,” Chen says. “I would sketch spaghetti networks of highways and train networks.”

So when the Taubman College Career Fair helped connect him with an internship with Fehr & Peers during his junior year, it was a dream opportunity years in the making. While there, Chen applied his experience from coursework to take the lead on a community engagement session. Drawing from Urban Technology principles, he developed survey questions and a scavenger hunt activity that got residents thinking about their neighborhood, what improvements had been made already, and what needs they still had.

After graduating, Chen was hired as an Engineer Planner I with the firm, where he now works on data visualization and mapping to help tell the story of how its transportation projects are improving communities, as well as community engagement to ensure its recommendations are appropriate for not just the physical environment, but also the culture of residents. 

Looking back on his time in the Urban Technology program, he says being among the first to go through and have a hand in shaping it gave him and his cohort a shared sense of confidence.

“There’s this kind of common sentiment between the people in our cohort: ‘If you have something uncertain, come to us. We’re used to it. It’s all good.’”

Posted on 2/6/2026