Garrett Grover

ISM A/2nd Period

Mrs. Kahlich

14 November 2018

ISM Final Speech

Welcome everyone (Mr. Warner, Ms. Villanueva)! I am so glad that you all could make it

to my final presentation. Today, I will be showcasing my mentorship and final product through

this somewhat interactive presentation.

Before I get into the ins and outs of my mentorship, I would like to quickly review the

Weebly website that I created as a form of documentation of my mentorship and final product.

This website is accessible to the public at www.garrettgrover.weebly.com. As you can see from

the homepage, I have an overview of the contents of this website and a picture of my mentor and

I. I have seven tabs including my home page, project introduction and purpose paper tab which

has an essay attached about the overview of my project, ISM class assignments which includes

multiple journal entries documenting my experience at my mentorship and a transcribed

interview between my mentor and I, professional resume, mid-term presentation PowerPoint and

information, final presentation PowerPoint and information, and lastly an invitation to the Clear

Horizons Early College High School Senior ISM Expo. If anyone would care to learn more about

my website, I would be glad to go into more detail about it at the end of my presentation.
 So to kick this presentation off on a lighthearted note, I want to give a quote that my

mentor told me on one of my first days as his mentee, and that is “structural engineers stand by

their work, not under it.” I hope that joke is made apparent by its context. I want to introduce my

mentor and me now as some of you in the audience may be unaware of who the two of us are.

So, my name is Garrett Grover, and I am a senior at Clear Horizons Early College High School. I

am enrolled in a class called Independent Study Mentorship or ISM for short where I go out in

the real working world and find a mentor in a career choice of interest. From there, I spend a

semester working alongside a mentor who teaches me about said career field through different

types of active learning. This semester I have been given an amazing opportunity to work with

my current mentor, Mr. Jim Warner. To give a little bit of background on Mr. Warner, he studied

civil engineering with a specialization in structural engineering at Penn State University, he is a

professional engineer, and he has had quite a few different places of employment, but the most

significant was the eight years he spent at Foster Wheeler and the sixteen years that he has been

at Walker Consultants. Given that I am just a little bit more inexperienced, I do not have the

quite the track record that Mr. Warner has. Instead, I have a few aspirations for my future which

include attending my dream school, the University of Texas at Austin, for civil engineering and

specializing in either structural or transportation engineering. While this specific discipline of

engineering is still open to change, I feel that it is a good starting point given my newfound

interest in engineering. However, I will address this a little more in detail throughout my

presentation. Nonetheless, I still want to talk to you all today about my experience in civil

engineering, more specifically how it applies to my final product, a bridge/overpass across Bay

Area Blvd where it intersects Route 3. As a side note, I want to make it clear right now that I will

be using the terms bridge and overpass interchangeably.

 So, as I briefly addressed in the last slide, ISM is a required class at Clear Horizons

which is the reason I even have a mentorship right now, and the reason I am even presenting in

front of you all today. My decision to work at a Civil Engineering firm to be quite honest was a

spontaneous one. At the time, I really had no burning desire to pursue any career. I mainly just

knew that I did not care for my previous mentorship at an Optometrists office or the medical

field in general. I only knew that I enjoyed math and science in school, and I had a few friends

who spoke highly of their mentorships with engineers, so, I thought that I would give

engineering a shot. As far as civil goes, there was seriously no reason for me to choose that

discipline. My best guess for picking it was just that it is a really well-known discipline of

engineering as compared to something like Industrial or Environmental. Furthermore, after

having chosen this career field, I was interested in seeing if it would be a career I wanted to

pursue or one that I could cross off my list as I did with my mentor at the Optometrists office.

Now that we’ve become a little bit acquainted, I would like to start discussing my

experience at my mentorship and the design of my final product. So, to design my overpass, I

needed some baseline information that could supplement the calculations I would later complete.

Some of the major sources that I found included the Precast or Prestressed Concrete Institute or

PCI which told me what size bridge beam precast sections were available and how much load

each one could carry for the design of my bridge beam. As my mentor told me, engineers are not

that creative which became evident when scrolling through this website because each beam was

literally named after its shape and size. For example, based on the needs for my bridge and

bridge beams, I decided to use a U-40 beam. A U-40 beam is a beam that is the shape of the
letter “U” and has a height of 40 inches or 3 feet and 6 inches as can be seen from the picture on

the right. The other major website or source that I utilized was the one which pertained to

railroad clearances. The full name of it is listed on my second bullet point, but I am not going to

even attempt to say it all. Before I get into why this website was useful, I want to first address

why I chose this project because it ties back into this source. So, my project was inspired by the

fact that I frequently encounter significant congestion issues which arise along Bay Area Blvd

due to both traffic and the train that occasionally passes by. Therefore, I decided to design an

overpass across Bay Area Blvd. where it intersects Highway 3 as a means to alleviate this

problem. As seen from the visual aid in the middle and bottom diagrams, my clearance had to be

at least 22 feet and 6 inches. However, since table 1 applied to my project for designing an

overpass, I recently realized that my clearance actually only needed to be 14 feet and 6 inches,

the standard clearance for a fire truck.

Throughout my mentorship, Mr. Warner has been my main support in terms of learning

different aspects of civil engineering. He taught me first and foremost that a good engineer aside

from being able to crunch numbers is one who can visualize what it is they are making. He told

me that it was because he could visualize things like a bridge beam or a girder that he was able to

excel as an engineer. Unfortunately, today, universities are spitting out many intelligent

engineers, but ones who are not prepared for real-world applications. So, by being able to

visualize what it is you want, the better an engineer you become. Another big part of my project

as well as a big aspect of structural engineering was when Mr. Warner taught me about concrete

and reinforcement and how they interact. See, concrete is very strong in compression, but is very

weak in tension. What I mean by this is that if you were to push in on concrete, it would be a lot
harder to bring it to its breaking point as compared to pulling out on it. Due to concrete’s

weakness in tensile strength, one would add reinforcement composing of longitudinal and

transverse reinforcement to fix this problem. Longitudinal bars are also known as rebar which

are the steel members that are placed within concrete to increase tensile strength. Transverse

bars, at least those that pertained to my project, included stirrups and tie sets. So, I had to

calculate the shear and flexure of each piece of concrete for a strength design. From there, I had

to figure out how much steel was needed, what size rebar provided optimal tensile strength, what

size and spacing of stirrups provided shear reinforcement and prevented diagonal tension in my

beams, and what size and spacing of tie sets/transverse reinforcement helped prevent buckling of

my longitudinal bars in my columns. Lastly, my mentor showed me how to develop engineering

sketches as seen in the visual on the right and as will be seen later in my final product. Overall, I

am really happy with everything Mr. Warner was able to teach me during this mentorship.

As far as challenges go in my mentorship and final product, I would say that it was the

beginning where I was struggling most. All of the new vocabulary that I had to use was a

difficult adjustment because I didn’t have a lot of background knowledge on their full meanings

and applications. Although the vocabulary was definitely a big challenge during my mentorship,

my own notes were the bigger downfall to my learning experience when I first started at Walker.

As can be seen on the visual to the right, my notes significantly improved from the beginning to

the end of my mentorship. The reason for this improvement was because I figured out a little

later that I wasn’t grasping the concepts I was learning and knew a change needed to be made.

After having made this change, my understanding of everything Mr. Warner was explaining to

me became much more clear. However, since I hadn’t made this change until later in my project,
my final product became a struggle to design in terms of the sections of my bridge that I had

little knowledge about. Nonetheless, with time and a lot of assistance from Mr. Warner, we were

able to complete my final engineering sketch.

Even though my project was a rollercoaster of learning and adapting, I was still able to

finish my final product. My final product is a design of an overpass across Bay Area Blvd where

it intersects Highway 3 mainly as a means to alleviate the issue of waiting for the train to cross

on the railroad parallel to Route 3. My intention for designing this was to make driving in the

Clear Lake area a little bit less stressful. As stated before, I used different calculations to

determine what size and spacing of reinforcement was needed within each of my concrete

sections. Aside from the structural engineering aspect of my project, my mentor pointed out near

the end of my mentorship that the transportation aspect had actually been facilitating a huge part

of my project in terms of where to locate certain sections of my bridge. It was also useful in

determining points of reference so that said sections could fit within my dimensions and also

serve as a means for a contractor to easily understand the placement of my sections. I think that

though this project was a giant learning curve for me, the experience of being placed in a

potential situation that civil engineers could actually face as a high school student is a unique one

that I am glad I was able to participate in and get some knowledge and experience out of it.

To conclude this presentation, I again really want to emphasize the lasting impact that

this mentorship had on me. I feel that the knowledge and wisdom Mr. Warner imparted on me is

something that I can take with me through my college years and career. The benefits of having

taken ISM and being a part of this opportunity is one that I cannot take for granted as it was an
investment of my time and Mr. Warner’s time that will serve me well in the future. With that

said, I want to thank my mentor Mr. Warner for taking time out of each of his already busy

weeks to mentor me, answer my questions, and teach me valuable information for both my

career and my individual life. I also want to thank my ISM teacher Mrs. Kahlich as it is because

of her that I was even able to take part in this opportunity. I want to thank my evaluator Ms.

Villanueva for taking time to sit in on my presentation and Walker Consultants for allowing Mr.

Warner to mentor me. Lastly, I want to thank the audience for also sitting in on my presentation

today.

Because some the information in this presentation comes from outside sources, it is

appropriately cited in this slide.

Thank you again to everyone here today. Are there any questions?