Quote:
Originally Posted by mightyaa
Nope, just sort of fell into it. I'm second generation. My Dad has a dual license, so he really started the niche. Folks would rather pay one person to do two roles I guess... Some colleges still offer the Architectural Engineering accredidated degrees if you want to go that route.
So for me, it started off just following my Dad around jobsites doing insurance type work as a kid... really interesting to see what fire, floods, tornadoes, micro-burst, structural overloading and the good old gas explosion can do to a structure; insurance companies now use only structural engineers  . I just sort picked up after him once licensed. Those could be really cool... I've seen watermelon sized hailstones blow holes through roofs and sandblast the side of a house. I've seen steel get melted into spagetti. I've seen a microburst peel a 70,000 sf warehouse roof off. I've seen the building next to the one that blew up have it's common wall shoved in three feet, but still stands. I've seen how firecuts on joist really work, and what happens if you don't do them. Tons of cars versus houses. Basically, some really cool stuff doing insurance; they used to call us out when their own appraisers were baffled.
After a decade of that, the lawyers started calling. It's a lot of brain damage... 20-60 page reports, long days of standing around on a jobsite to look at the same error repeated over and over and over... Getting grilled by your peers on the opposing team. Getting grilled by 6 or 7 lawyers during depositions hoping you don't know your stuff. Having your personal life /expenses / history brought up (some lawyers are petty). Plus you essentially are always dealing with someone's misery and dealing with the worst our industry has to offer on a regular basis so it's rather depressing. But it does pay exceptionally well so the overhead is low. Plus even in this economy, I can still pick and chose my cases working as much or as little as I want... I still can't commit to doing it full time though since I'd rather be designing buildings; so it's a niche. |
how about animating the incident? what program do you use for it?
