I'm sure everyone remembers Hurricane Irene from the beginning of the semester - RPI SWE's own Courtney Dunham was out in the field working during the storm! And we were lucky to get an exclusive look at her experiences with Hurricane Irene, leaving RPI SWE, and entering the "Real World". Take a look!
When I first entered the “real world” I was a little nervous
about the differences I would see from my internship the previous summer and the
transition I would need to take from college life to industry life. After being
in my position for almost three months I can tell you it’s not all that
different from SWE life. I do I miss my awesome E-board and the female presence
I was spoiled with at RPI. I just had a training session where I was the only
woman out of 50 people and I was the youngest by 10 years. Big shock compared
to walking into a General Body Meeting with 100 women my age.
One thing I have definitely noticed the longer I am here is
the amount of time you have is never enough. The first few weeks I was worried
I was getting things done too quickly, the trainings would never end, and I
wouldn’t get concrete projects. Now I can say I am swamped and the 40 hour work
week is not enough. I have two legit transmission engineering projects, one of
them I was just given that is going to be the biggest my group has seen in over
40 years(!), along with three other projects that deal with compliance and
standards work. I’m nervous and apprehensive
that I am not as prepared as I could be but the support system in my group
reminds me of my support system that I was privileged to have after taking that
first step into SWE leadership.
Besides this latest project ,Hurricane Irene has been the focus
of my time at Baltimore Gas & Electric. As the state’s utility company we
were responsible for getting everyone’s power back on. Friday before the storm
was going to hit I received a call, telling me I was mobilized and to report to
the staging area at 6am Sunday morning. The storm was so severe they called in
all their employees, including new hires that haven’t been with the company for
very long. I worked 100 hours from that Sunday to Friday. Some of my coworkers
worked from Saturday to Saturday putting in 130 hours. With over 750,000 people
without power it took a lot of man hours for BGE to get people back up and
running. Some experience/lessons learned that I gained from storm duty include:
watching BGE and out of state crews find and analyze the problems causing
outages and solving them by removing trees and branches before replacing either
downed wire, insulators, or poles; learning to navigate many different areas of
the state of MD that I have never been in before; and learning to adapt to the
environment I have to work in and the situations that are presented to me.
I can say that I have experienced a lot in the last three
months as newly hired engineer. People might say they don’t use the knowledge
they developed in college in their real life job, but I have already used mine.
I work mostly with electrical engineers and they were having a tough time
remembering/figuring out stress and strain on our conductors so Strength and
Behavior of Materials came in handy! Also I am slowly being taught Electrical
Engineering….oh circuits!
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