Blog 21: Mentorship

Literal

Link is on the side of my blog labeled mentorship log hours under the heading mentorship.

Contact Name: Tzouh-Jaw Wu
Mentorship Place: Kanda and Tso Consulting Structural Engineers

Interpretive

What is the most important thing you gained from this experience and why?

The experience I gained most from this mentorship was my design in AutoCAD. I do want to purse an engineering career in the future so having a first hand experience with AutoCAD helps be better with a program that I will definitely use in the future. The AutoCAD is extremely cool (although it's not the most updated version), showing how buildings and structures are shaped on paper before it's being built on the ground. This experience also showed me how difficult AutoCAD can be during an engineer's career. There are still many applications that I still need to learn on AutoCAD, or at least I haven't learned the faster methods in drawing structures. Most of the engineers at my mentorship used AutoCAD and used it to communicate with other engineers, which I didn't know until I went to this mentorship.

Applied

How has what you've done helped you to answer your EQ? Please explain.

Most of my mentorship included my time on AutoCAD, designing structures. This was really helped me answer my EQ because it gave me a better foundation leading to my current three answers. My topic, structural engineering, is a complex topic, so having better foundation was really important. For example, my answer 1 focused on particular structure, which came from my AutoCAD work during my mentorship. My mentorship also gave me connections with a lot of engineers that helped give me the ideas to my answers or helped clarify my answers. For example, I was researching seismic analysis and I came across equivalent static analysis. During my interviews, I asked questions regarding equivalent static analysis and was given responses on how this analysis measures a building's acceleration with an earthquake's load. After being given solid information, I then proceeded to make anlaysis as part of my second answer towards my EQ.

Overall, mentorship has given me a hands one experience on the design aspect, AutoCAD, which helped gave me a better foundation on how structures were used for earthquake resistance. This foundation helped inspire me to research other ideas for my answers to my EQ. My mentorship also gave me many important resources by providing lots of professional engineers at my mentorship. These engineers helped me gain many primary sources for my answers, but more clarity on the information of my answers.