<p>Is your job…enjoyable?</p>
<p>Yes, very much so. I get to shape New York’s skyline!</p>
<p>It goes in waves.</p>
<p>In a local sense, sometimes I have weeks where if I have to design one more friggin’ beam, I’m going to knock someone’s head against a wall and giggle at the coconut-like sound it makes.</p>
<p>In a global sense, what I do is breathtaking. Especially in winter, it’s usually dark by the time I leave the office in our building downtown. I walk outside and look up and am absolutely struck by what human beings can achieve… The buildings in downtown Houston are humongous and have such a sense of permanency and stateliness. The part that amazes me is that I know how to select the bits and pieces of those buildings and put them together and make them stay up like that. Me! Some random chick from Dallas, two years out of school! It’s vaguely terrifying, absolutely wondrous, and a little overwhelming that I can take my calculator and a few books and pencil and paper and (slowly!) crank out a skyscraper. That’s just… ridiculous. And awesome.</p>
<p>It’s as good as it gets.</p>
<p>I have never seen a women build a building before or build/construct anything for that matter…and I live in New York City.</p>
<p>Half of the people in my trailer are female (construction project management). As far as tradesmen, I’ve met female teamsters, laborers, painters, electricians, and carpenters. There aren’t many though.</p>
<p>I’ve never seen one in my life, and I’ve lived in lower Manhattan my entire life. They probably don’t go out to the field a lot right?</p>
<p>The tradesmen are definitely in the field, but not counting flagmen, you wouldn’t really see them from the street. The ones I met all worked interiors. And there’s always the possibility that you did see one but didn’t realize she was female, especially if you’re at a distance.</p>
<p>Way to go aibarr–sounds like you def are doing what you were meant to do (if that makes sense) and that all of those long hours in college were worth it! I only hope that our JR Eng student feels the same way at some point!</p>
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<p>It’s because construction guys typically go all stupid when there are women around. It was always fun to watch them catcall and wolfwhistle and take off their shirts when I walk on the jobsite and then watch them realize that I’m the project engineer for the forensic investigation they were about to participate in, and that I’d be telling their foreman what I needed them to do all day. They’d all kind of get this look on their face like they’d swallowed a sack of marbles. Whoops! Once they get over the weirdness of having a woman on the site, they were typically really cool, and they’d ask questions about being an engineer, and about how many years it takes in school to become an engineer, and about what my job was usually like. I think construction guys are great.</p>
<p>And nobody really expects that women know their way around tools, so you’re not alone… When I was in grad school, I took a course on welds that had a lab portion. I’d have my Carhartt jacket on and my welding gloves and I’d have my hair twisted up and under a backwards ballcap and my mask down… The week before I had to do a double-sided CJP groove weld for a grade (they got radiographed and then pulled apart, and your grade was based upon the tensile capacity of the weld and how clean the radiograph profile was… really cool lab!), I broke my elbow rollerblading and was told to not let my arm out of that sling no matter what. I got in early the next week to practice, since I now had to do stick welding one-handed for a grade. The other guys filter in, watching as this person welds, one-handed, egging me on, giving me crap… I finish a string of gorgeous fillet welds, shut off my arc, and do the whole pull-off-the-gloves, let-loose-the-cascade-of-brunette-hair thing, look around at the slack-jawed guys who’d just been outwelded by the girl. Luckily, they were great guys and I didn’t have to dish too much back about the fact that they didn’t think it was me under that mask…!</p>
<p>But yeah, we can build/construct things, too. ;)</p>
<p>Construction workers are the people who build skyscrapers and tall buildings, right? Would they need to have knowledge of physics and math to do all of that? I’d think that would be necessary.</p>
<p>sounds like a scene from “engineering: the movie”</p>
<p>It’s a job.</p>
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<p>Mostly, they are the people that do the manual work that engineers tell them to do. They don’t design the buildings, they just do the manual work.</p>
<p>Yeah, I enjoy it. I’m a year out of school. At the moment, I’m helping to make advances in machine learning. I’m also writing a grant proposal where, if we actually win the contract, I would get to lead the design of a next-gen object recognition system. My work is like bringing science fiction to life. It’s great.</p>
<p>Oh, and since we seem to have a side discussion about female engineers, I’m the only woman in my division. :D</p>
<p>The more experienced construction workers tend to have some idea of the basic physics behind it. Union workers have to go through an apprenticeship period where they take classes and work for 3 or 4 years, so they do know something. As gstein said, they don’t need to know the design details though.</p>
<p>The knowledge level also varies by trade. Laborers (the ones who do all the “physical” work don’t know as much as carpenters or electricians.</p>
<p>Funny thing is some construction workers make more than engineers.</p>