Sunday, September 29, 2013

Back at the office

Another 4 day work week coming up. We get Tuesday off for National Day. People in the Mainland get the entire week off. I feel like we should get Monday off too. But hopefully it will be pretty chill with people taking vacation and all. At the moment, our team has a lot of people but really don't know what will happen when people finish their secondment assignments or go to site.

People don't seem to be working as much as I did last year. Whenever I'm in the office on the weekends, no one else seems to be in from our team. For example, I didn't see anyone yesterday even though we're supposed to be rushing out another set of tender drawings... Or maybe I was just working way, way too much last year. I was basically there 24/7, pushing out tender drawings and submissions on a daily basis. Nowadays, our team can afford to have someone sit there and do only coordination work for Stubbs Rd. He's doesn't have to take up an actual submission. And there's a graduate just playing around with old models and waiting for the new layout plan and structural loads to come through from the client. Last year, I was doing coordination, making tender drawings, putting together submissions for Stubbs Rd and still had to look after two other projects. Basically I was doing 3, 4 people's worth of work...

Anyway, I've talked to my boss about rotating to the structures group. Not sure when this will happen but I think it will be good for me to learn structural design. I guess the downside is that I will have to give up working on my current projects again. I like to be fully involved in the projects that I do. Otherwise, you just end up helping out with small stuff instead of being able to look at the whole picture. And I'm a big picture person. I can't do anything without knowing all the details and background. I think it would be beneficial for me to learn the basics of structural design and the structural way of thinking about an engineering problem.

I'm also brushing up on finite element analysis. What I learned in school was very theoretical. I think there needs to be a link between what I learn in school and what I am doing now, which is heavily relying on a commercial program for my analyses. Most of the people at the office didn't have as a theoretical background on finite element as I did. It's just not taught in undergraduate studies and even for MS courses, it's really hard to connect academia with practice. I'm hoping to make some notes or a presentation so that people can at least have an understanding before diving into hardcore continuum mechanics modeling.

1 comment:

yalu said...

I guess all that hiring that happened when you were really busy has come to fruition - people are trained and put to work now!