Job Shadowing Experience

During my day at a workplace, I went to a private engineering firm by the name of Hampton, Lenzini, and Renwick, Inc. This was an interesting place to go because of my interest in engineering. I personally learned a lot during this experience because I got to talk to real engineers about real job sites. I did not just follow one person all day though. What I did was I met with my contact at 8 AM in his office. Then what we did was we met each other and talked about random stuff to get to know each other. After the initial meeting of him, what my person did, Steve Megginson, was showed me around their office. It was a somewhat small office, considering it only fit about 15 people to work in it. After I was shown around the place, we sat down in his office and he went through the basics of the trade. He showed me some different types of jobs that he has done as well as he enlightened me about the joys of his job. This person got to travel around a lot to job sites and he got to inspect bridges. I forgot to say that this person was a bridge specialist. We talked for about two hours about what he did and he also showed me other things like how they had to promote themselves because they are a private firm. He talked about how it is important to be very good at the technical side of the buisness, but if you do not learn to communicate your ideas to other people then you will not be a very sucessful engineer. After we talked for a long time. He took me over to another engineer to talk to. He was a different specialist, he was a forensic engineer. I had never heard of forensic engineers before and I think that his job sounds really cool. He is like a detective trying to figure out what went wrong in an engineering blunder. The ironic part about this person is that he turned out to be the dad of a person that I compete against for track. So we had a little more to talk about than just engineering. This man talked about a few different scenarios that he had to figure out, and it was fun because he tried to involve us in the discussion rather than just telling us how he did it. He then talked about the trusses on bridges for a little while and we moved on to the next person. Then next guy that we talked to was a hydrolics guy. He did all of the figuring for where a river or creek would move so that it would not erode the supports of a bridge. After talking to all of these people, I noticed that all of these people worked as a team to make sure that their bridges were safe and that their bridges worked efficiently. They all talked about the different stages of the engineering process as well as the buisness aspect of working with budgets. I found out yesterday that there is a lot more that goes into the engineering field than just pluging in numbers to equations. I learned about the buisness side of the trade, and I think it sounds like a good job to have.