The New Job Begins

My first day at Stroud, Pence, & Asso­ciates was today. I can say whole-heart­ed­ly, I have begun all over again. It’s cer­tain­ly hum­bling, but a good expe­ri­ence. I’m with a much small­er out­fit now, and every­one comes across as being good natured and sup­port­ive (not that they weren’t at URS).

I got an e‑mail from a friend today who, upon read­ing this blog, was wor­ried that things might not be going so well. I had­n’t thought about the tone that pre­vi­ous post might have had until that. So, the sto­ry thus far (skip to next para­graph if you’ve heard this one): after some soul-search­ing, I decid­ed that the time in my life to try the oth­er branch of struc­tur­al engi­neer­ing was now. The oth­er branch being build­ing design, as I was for­mer­ly work­ing in the design of bridges. I took a job offer with a engi­neer­ing firm based out of Vir­ginia Beach, VA (see above) in mid-Decem­ber, and left my job at URS Cor­po­ra­tion on the 7th of this month.

That gets us to my first day. I’m very for­tu­nate to be a com­pa­ny with plen­ty of work. I was added as a struc­tur­al engi­neer to a build­ing design first thing this morn­ing (appar­ent­ly, my boss thought this would be a good learn­ing project). Of course, what most peo­ple would­n’t know that aren’t in the struc­tur­al busi­ness, the pace of build­ing design is a great deal faster than that of bridges (months, as opposed to years). So, I’m feel­ing a lit­tle over­whelmed, but not sur­prised. I’ve a great deal to learn, but that was the very idea behind tak­ing the job. I’ve also had a month to psy­che myself up for the process.

I sup­pose, I should feel pret­ty good about the first day. As it turns out, the hard­est part was fill­ing out all those tax and ben­e­fit forms. The struc­tures part, what lit­tle there was of it today, came easy. I’m sure that will change soon enough, but I’m not going to rush it.

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Categorized as General

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

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