Culminating Blog

    From working with my mentor, Jose Quintero and his job firm of PG&E I gained a lot of knowledge and made me really open my eyes. During my hours working with my mentor I was able communicate with my mentor and build off from any of his ideas and have an overview of anything I'd like to pursue later on in life. Working with my mentor and PG&E I was also able to collaborate with my mentor and share ideas and viewpoints on different issues and jobs that need to be completed. Being on an actual PG&E site called for critical thinking and communication because you need to see if a pipe would fit/work and how the construction or replacement of the pipe affect those around it. We collaborated with different engineers and we all gave our insights on a specific job that would later on help us get this job completed.

     From this Capstone experience I was able to get a sense of what an actual engineer does and I how I would feel about and whether or not I'd want to pursue this career. Working with my mentor and his fellow coworkers it made me realize that you can't do a job on your own. You need to talk and collaborate with people from other departments and different positions in order to get a job done and to get the job done right. Since I'm not really good with working with a team it kind of helped me and it helped me work with others in order to get something done. During this project I also learned that it is okay to ask questions, when ever there was a meeting the PG&E engineers would all have questions to ask about their project they were working on. By asking questions people were able to get something clarified and also feedback/insight from other engineers with different jobs. I learned that there is nothing wrong with asking questions, it is better to ask questions and get the job done right than to go into a job blindly. It helped me become more social because everyone there was so friendly and always willing to help and how you need to be friends with each other in order to have each others help for working on a project.

     Some challenges I faced were being shy and talking to people I didn't know. I'm calm and myself with people that I've known for a long time. I overcame this challenge by talking with others and talking about similar jobs and projects that they had going on. I also faced the challenged of being nervous and shy to ask questions because I didn't want to look dumb or stupid in front of the others when and if I had a question where I was confused. I was able to overcome this challenge because during the meetings almost every engineer had a question and something they needed clarification on. I also learned that you need to review your work and see if you're going in the right direction of the project. This Capstone project made me realize that many things need to be taken into account like people's safety and that in order to get a job done it's going to take more than just you to get the project done.