Dichotomy...

When I walk out of the building in a few minutes, I will have been working here for a full year. In that time I feel I have learned a lot and have become a valuable member of my team. There's still a lot I don't know, but I'm trying to take on as much responsibility as I can with the hopes of being promoted quickly. (My new boss seems to think I'm some sort of god for handling our integration testing, creating and/or controlling all our training materials, writing all our spec documents and performace verification tests, taking care of our deliverable builds, and creating most of our ship-specific configuration files. That actually sounds like a lot more work than it really is, mostly because it's all very cyclical. We'll have a period where I have to do nothing but documentation for 3 weeks straight (like a couple weeks ago), or a period where I have a ton of config updates to make when we get new info from NSWC, and then it'll just sort of come and go. It's plenty to keep me busy, yes of course, but it's usually not overwhelming.) I've traveled a few times to Groton, New London, Norfolk, Bremerton, and Bangor. And countless trips to LM-Manassas and Carderock. I hope in this next year to actually ride a submarine underway. We've got Seawolf and SSGN trials coming up that I might be able to sneak my way onto. Also, Rob has expressed interest in having me work on some more hardware stuff for him, doing some simple analog (yay!) EMI filtering for some of our high current power supplies. I know that sounds crappy, but I always thought filtering and EMC it was kind of fun. And I really do want to make Senior Systems Engineer before I've been here for 2 years, so it looks like I've got my work cut out for me for over the next 12 months.

Posted by Rev. Adam on Friday, July 22, 2005 at 5:40 PM | Permalink