Ghazal Soukaria, who goes by Gigi, joined Harrington Group as a Building Information Modeling (“BIM”) technician in early April. Her background is in architecture — in 2014 she earned a bachelor’s degree from Al-Ba’ath University in her hometown of Homs, Syria, and stayed in the area working as an architect and designer for nearly five years. After getting married in 2019, she and her husband moved to Dubai, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, where she worked for a construction company doing building design.

Despite the havoc that the COVID-19 pandemic began wreaking in 2020, Gig said that was the luckiest year of her life, and a turning point for her — it was when she was granted a visa to the U.S. through the immigration lottery system. She and her husband settled in California last year, and she quickly found a job doing fire alarm design. The industry suits her, and now as one of HGI’s new BIM technicians she’s eager to continue learning.

“I was very excited to work in a new field I’d never been in before,” Gigi said. “I had heard that HGI is a respected company with a great team, they appreciate each other, and they support each other in learning new methods. That’s what I was searching for and what I really found after I started working with them.”

When she isn’t working, she loves practicing belly dancing and exploring the hiking trails around her new home with her husband.