Whenever people ask me what I do for a living, I usually get a blank stare when I tell them that I'm an engineer.  So, here are a few pictures of me working, to shed some light on just what do engineers do?????

I worked as a road inspector for two summers while I was in college.  I always got teased that I was the one holding the stop sign, so here's a picture of me doing just that!

But, what I was actually doing, was a little surveying (above), soil sampling (yes, playing with dirt), and making sure the construction workers didn't get away with TOO much.

My first job after graduation was working for a small consulting firm called ERC.   There we did Finite Element Analysis (FEA) for customers.  FEA is making a computer model of something, applying forces, pressures, etc. to the model, and seeing if the thing is broken, or if it's ok.  In this picture, I'm standing in front of work I did for a company on a large rubber part.

In 1999, I went to work for ANSYS, Inc., a software company that specializes in FEA.   My job was to provide customer support, do demos for sales, and teach class.  These pictures show me doing a demonstration at an AutoCAD user's meeting.

The meeting was held in the lobby of an office building that locks the women's bathrooms (not the men's).  I tried the bathrooms on several floors, and they were all locked, and I couldn't find anyone to unlock them for me, so I ducked into a men's room, and got out of there again as fast as I could!

For the first two years at ANSYS, I had to haul a full-size computer around (and often the 17" monitor), so Mike (one of the salesguys) took this picture of me to emphasize to the higher-ups that this needed to change.

The first response we got was pretty smart-alecky ("In my day, we had to haul around computers that weighed TEN times as much"), but a few months after, I got a laptop, and my sales trips were much easier!

One-and-a-half years into my job, my duties were changed, and I no longer did support nor teaching, but just did presales work.  This means I have to (get to?) go to the annual sales meeting in Pennsylvania.  There's always a fun activity that incorporates that year's cultural phenom; in 2001, it was 'Survivor', so we all got shirts saying "ANSYS Survivor" on the front, and did all sorts of challenges for prizes.  Here I'm with salesman Dave Briggs, in our 'uniform'.

Every year, Houston is host to the Offshore Technology Conference, a huge conference for the oil industry.  ANSYS has a booth that I help work at, answering technical questions to attendees.