It’s that time of year again: newly graduated college students are entering the workforce. For the student, it’s an anxious time. They are often wondering how and if four plus years of college has effectively prepared them for the real working world. For the potential employer, it can be a gamble. They have decided to take a chance on someone who likely does not have any professional work experience, but expect production from day one. On a recent visit to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, my colleague Scott Fischer got a firsthand view of what students are doing to prepare for a career.
Category: In the Coffer
Not everything fits into an easy category. “In the Coffer” is where our engineers cut loose and talk about personal passions.
Is It Friday Yet? Maintaining A Positive, Motivational and Fun Work Environment
It’s not Friday yet, but I am looking forward to the obnoxious Hawaiian shirts some of my coworkers wear as part of our Engineering Department’s unofficial Hawaiian Shirt Day each week. It’s a little thing, but it definitely helps lighten the mood and gives us all an opportunity to interact with each other.Continue Reading
Vacation – Can Engineers Take It?
My blog post is late this week – I’m going to blame it on vacation. According to this article analyzing a study by Expedia, Americans did not use $34 billion worth of vacation time they were entitled to in 2011. This started me thinking about how difficult it can be for structural engineers to take a real vacation.Continue Reading
Congratulations to Our Structural Engineering Blog Sweepstakes Winners!
To launch our Structural Engineering Blog, in April we hosted a sweepstakes inviting you to sign up for blog email updates by June 1, 2012. Everyone who also posted a comment to the blog during that time period received a bonus entry into the sweepstakes. The five winning entries received a Simpson Strong-Tie prize pack. Congratulations to our winners:
R. Johnson – Chicago, Illinois
D. Bentti – Anchorage, Alaska
R. Porter – Westfield, MA
D. Weinstein, PE – Philadelphia, PA
Z. Andriuk – White Plains, MD
If you’d like automatic email updates when a new blog entry is posted (usually once a week), sign up here.
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So. . .What Do You Love About Structural Engineering?
A few years ago, we hosted a Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work® Day at our home office in Pleasanton, CA. During introductions, several parents told the children what they did and how they chose their particular profession (you can see what my son thinks I do in my bio). At our home office, we have accounting, finance, product management, IT, administration, marketing, and a few others I’m probably missing, so it is a diverse group the kids heard from that day.
And the careers were often not what people had originally planned for. Many shared wonderful stories about the twists and turns their careers took until they finally discovered their passion and job satisfaction. Often, this was a career that they didn’t even know existed when they chose a major in college or first entered the workforce.
So, what was my story?