My First Day of Work

They wanted me to show up at 9:00 AM, so of course I woke up at 6:30. Paranoid that I wouldn't have time to run shower and eat breakfast and drive six minutes down the road motivated me to get going. I was ready to go by 8 AM so I spent time watching the news and I went out for a mocha. Then I finally drove to work and walked in the door 15 minutes early.

I had to sign a few forms and one particular form mentioned that if I had any previous inventions I should disclose them in an attachment. I didn't sign it immediately because I wanted to make sure I attached info about my patents. The person who was helping me didn't know what to do because that had never happened before. The other person in the office didn't know what to do either. Then their boss got involved and read the form to see what it really said. I suggested that simply attaching the second page of my resume would probably suffice since it listed my patent numbers. Yep, 15 minutes into my new job my ego was as inflated as ever.

Then I drove from the main location to the location I will be actually working at and I missed the highway interchange. I nearly had an emotional episode because at the rate they are paying me I don't want to waste a minute. I managed to finally get to work and start working on tutorials for the software that I will be using, ANSYS, which I have never used. At lunch I went out to my car to get my lunch and I took a few wrong turns and had to get directions on the way out. Then I was locked out because my security badge wasn't activated yet.

In the afternoon I started working on my first "project". It's pretty simple but I had a few issues, such as how to partition in ANSYS. So I was stressing myself out trying to be perfect. I did manage to do a few original finite element simulations, probably half a dozen different ones focusing on two different models. I didn't finish the project, which was upsetting while I was at work. However, as I thought about the day on my evening run I had to laugh. I created and ran a successful 3D heat transfer simulation with 45,000 nodes using software I had never touched until today. HA! I might just survive...

In other news my computer has a bunch of cores and 20GB of RAM. That's the difference between the Mercedes level computers I did my thesis on and the F-22 that I'm working on now. It's a whole other realm. I am totally going to do a 1,000,000 node simulation in the next few weeks! (If I can actually justify it.)

The feeling I had Monday of stress trying to finish everything immediately was unlike any other feeling I have ever had. In college when I had a lot of work to do I just worked 14 hours a day for a week or so. At work, no one really does that. Part of it is that I am terrified that I am gong to screw it up and get fired, which is a little ridiculous, yet it is what I felt Monday. I have not adjusted to working for eight hours and not doing homework yet. I feel lazy.

It's terribly exciting! I don't know what to make of it yet. I even ran about 13 miles over two runs Monday (the day after a 23 miler). It's everything I wanted at this point in my life, minus the mountains. I mean I met half a dozen awesome people over the weekend so my social situation is looking more interesting all the time. I don't know what to make of it.