Tom Collins Tom is Nancy's cubemate here and he got a bachelors in rhetoric at Berkeley, and got his engineering degree at San Diego State. He stated that Caltrans was not his first job and he obtained it because his friend told him about this place and said it would be a good place to work at. He works here as a Senior Bridge Engineer which is the same thing that Nancy is.
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The first week of internship is over and to be completely honest I didn't do anything really crazy besides walking on the unfinished Genesee bridge. The thing that probably surprised me the most about interning here is that everyone is so friendly. I don't know if its because I look like I'm 12 or because I am interning for their boss. Other than that my 3 days have basically been copying papers for Nancy and finding the dimensions of the Gilman bridge for my independent project.
Nancy said that the mission of their company is to improve mobility across California. I definetely see it being fullfilled in the work that Nancy has done herself. No one takes into account how much time and effort it takes into making roads or building a bridge, I learned today that there is so much background planning before you can even start building it. A single plan for a bridge can be 70 pages of about 8"x22" paper.
My mentors name is Nancy Nickerson and she is a supervisor at CalTrans and is her first job. She went to Cal Poly and majored in Civil Engineering. I didn't get to know much about her life before that but that is all that she told me about her past. I do not have a picture of us together but I did get a picture of myself when I went to Genesee bridge and stood over flowing traffic on the I-5. I had to wear a hardhat, a vest, and work boots before I was allowed to enter the work site.
I am very excited to go work with Nancy and I believe that I will learn a lot more about how roads are built all while reinforcing my math skills through quantity calculations and surveying. I am going to be working with CAD to transfer 2D schematics to 3D models. I feel that since I am pretty good at math and I learn things quickly I will definetely be able to suceed in any task Nancy gives me.
Site VisitMy Mentor is Nancy Nickerson and she was very inviting and nice when I met her. We went over all of the requirements and rules that I will have to follow if I wished to intern there. I then interviewed her and asked her questions about what day to day work was like there. After we were finished with all of that we brainstormed my project idea, one of the main parts of working at CalTrans is being able to convert 2D schematics of bridges or roads to 3D designs in CAD. What we thought of was, going to a site and having me survey the bridge and get the exact measurements and specs of it then scaling it down to create a small plastic 3D printed version of the bridge with the exact measurements as its real life design.
All of the blank spaces were previously explained in our interview. |
Cameron TruongI will be interning at the California Department of Transportation for the month of January in 2017. Archives |