The work paid off. It’s a lot of hours put in, but I think you see that with any of the engineering design teams. I mean, we’re all civil engineers. We’re just having a good time. Hey, my name is Andrew Donaldson. A typical Tuesday, I got my first class at 9.30 in the morning. That’s forensic engineering. We deal with a lot of structural engineering problems for the most part. That’s what we’re kind of involved with, what we’re investigating, why failures happen, kind of looking at how to mitigate those risks. We have a representative from a company called WDP that is kind of in charge of a lot of the building investigations on Virginia Tech’s campus. One of the projects that they’re involved with was investigating efflorescence, that kind of white carbonate stuff that you see on a lot of the Hokie Stone. So that’s been a good class before. Following that at 11, I have computer analytics that’s mostly coding in Python, dealing with different data sets. One of my skills that I’m not as good at is coding. They do a really good job, in general, giving us status sets that are kind of related to civil engineering. Following analytics, I have a bit of a break, so after that I usually head to the gym or practice a guitar at my house, get some work done. My next class is at 3.30, it’s professional and legal issues in civil engineering. We’ve actually had some really good guest speakers come in. I think it’s really kind of foundational, and a lot of problems will come up that we’ll be faced with so being able to hear from these professionals about their experiences and how they’ve kind of dealt with different situations it’s it’s been good. Once that class gets out around five my band practices I’m in a rock band with some other engineers at Tech called RASA for ASA we started my sophomore year so I guess three years ago we practice over at the Wesley Foundation so that’s an awesome part of my day where I get to kind of relax take a break from some of the more academic stuff. After that, I’ll either go hang out with friends, I’m on the Concrete Canoe team, we have an intramural team, that’s been a really big part and it’s just so much fun. At the regional competition, it was just great to see everybody enjoying themselves and we competed really well. So that was just awesome to see everybody. The work paid off. It’s a lot of hours put in, but I think you see that with any of the engineering design teams, it does pay off when you get to finally see the final product. I mean, we’re all civil engineers, we’re just having a good time. So after graduation, I’ll be heading up to Charlottesville working for a company called WDP. They’re the same ones that presented to our forensic engineering class, investigating failures and how to remedy them. It’s pretty cool because I think I’ll get to work on a lot of historic buildings as well, preparing those buildings to be continuing their lifespan. It’s definitely something that I think Tech does a really good job of preparing us for. It’s kind of giving us a glimpse of what it might actually look like and how you kind of deal with these things and do your best to put your best work out there and to do it ethically.
