Looking back on my first 1/2 year

RagazzaDCitta — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 03:28:00 GMT

My first ½ year

When I read other people’s blogs, I notice that there are obvious differences among offices across the country. Each office is unique in its culture and people. The Dallas EC is made up of many young consultants who just graduated from school within a couple of years. I certainly like it that my first job in the real world is in a young and energetic environment I didn’t have a clear idea of what I’ll be doing when I accepted the job. I thought I’d be running models by clicking some buttons and reading books of regulations. That’s totally not a portrait of my regular day. Some of the excerpts of my first ½ year: walking through a plant where the air smells like ammonia, working for a few days in the colorful Albuquerque office, spending a whole day looking at many piping and instrumentation diagrams, staring at the computer trying to draw accurate buildings for models, getting excited in checking out model run results, doing millions of calculations using Excel, reading hundreds of MSDS and being shocked by some nasty species in chemicals, and sitting in on my colleagues’ brownbags while savouring my home-cooked meal.

What I enjoy most in the past half year is the people I work with and the flexibility we get. We don’t have to come in the office at a certain time and we can make up a couple of hours if we go for doctor appointments, car maintenance, etc (not to say we can do this every day). And of course, with our jobs we are always learning. There are always things we do not know about. New regulations/guidance keep coming. Tricky problems that we need to tackle for our clients. Although I have not been involved with projects of high complexity, I know we do have a smart and dedicated group here

What everyone is thinking about? The financial crisis…

Since I started my job back in May, Trinity has opened a couple of offices. Whenever I heard of an opening, I’m pretty impressed that our company is expanding quickly despite the current financial crisis. This is not to say that we are immune to the crisis. But we are doing better than the norm. How are we affected? As a pretty new employee, I recently noticed that one of our client’s stocks has dropped to 10 percent of its level a year ago. When our client limits their projects, our business is going to be limited to a certain extent. Yet, this is not the time for worry. I'm curious to see how long it takes for the economy to bounce back.

Ciao!

RagazzaDCitta — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 03:13:00 GMT

Hello all! My first post finally!!

I remembered reading the blogs on 56stories last year around November when I was researching about Trinity. At that time, I told myself that I'd write one if I got a job here. So here it is, I'm writing on 56stories!

I'm the newest hire at Trinity's Dallas Environmental Consulting (Dallas EC). Dallas is the headquarter so we have lots of other folks like computing support and accounting people in our big and nice office. I've been with Trinity for 5 months as a consultant. I'm not gonna talk about my job in my first post but I can say that I'm very happy working here.

My background: I had a BS in Environmental Sciences from the University of Virginia and a Master in Meteorology (more precisely atmospheric sciences) from Penn State. I'm originally from Hong Kong and have been in the States for 7 years. In Dallas EC, we have a good mix of engineers and meteorologists. Surprise surprise, I don't know anything more about weather forecasting than most of you and I don't actually need to know about it for my job. What is important though, is to understand the underlying principles of atmospheric dispersion modeling that I learned quite a bit in my undergrad and grad courses.

Besides working 40 hours of week, I enjoy shopping in fancy malls (you'll understand if you go to Hong Kong) and traveling. My latest plan for traveling is to celebrate my 10th anniversary of visits by revisiting the same place. This Christmas I'm going to visit Tokyo and next summer I hope to go to London again.

Yes, now that I've started this blog, I have to keep writing more. I shall tell you about my job in my next post :D