What's your profession's most interesting fact or secret? As a structural engineer, an engineer

designs buildings and structures with precise calculations and computer simulations of behavior

during various combinations of wind, seismic, flood, temperature events, and vibration loads

using mathematical equations and empirical relationships. The engineer uses the sum of structural engineering knowledge from the past millennium,

at least nine years of study and rigorous examinations to predict the worst outcomes and deduce the best design.

We use multiple layers of fail-saves in our calculations from approximations by hand calculations

to refinement with finite element analysis, from elastic

theory to plastic theory, with safety factors and multiple redundancies to prevent progressive

collapse. We accurately model an entire city at reduced scale for wind tunnel testing and

use ultrasonic testing for welds at connections. But the construction worker, straight out of high school,

puts it all together as cheaply and quickly as humanely possible, often disregarding signed and sealed

design drawings for their own improvised field fixes. Research is never as cool as you think it is,

even when there's fire and lasers involved. Most of the equipment I use is more than 20 years old

and often duct taped together. You're in research and you still have equipment? I just write

freaking grants all day. Amen to this. Plus it's often shoved in the basement or some windowless,

dusty room with moldy pipes. And there's an incessant hum from the machinery that kind

of makes you go Edgar Allan Poe story insane.

Real estate. Everything is negotiable, especially the fee. Surial renter here, I've never paid the

asking price. Actually, that's not quite true. One time they wouldn't budge on that, but installed a brand

new kitchen instead.

In the army, you'll do a hell of a lot of landscaping.

Oh man, when the new CG came to Fort Carson, he put out a memo that soldiers are not to be pulling weeds or edging.

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