Real-Life Communication
If you're lucky and have a role in a great civil engineering project
during your career, everyone will want to hear about it.
Sharing information
learned through hard work, experience and trial and error is one of the great
ways that engineers learn.
You're an experienced engineer who has just
completed a seven-year project: the construction of a massive waterline across
a desert in Saudi Arabia. The project was plagued by problems -- sandstorms,
heat stroke, a nearby war -- but eventually your company succeeded.
Now
you're back home and your boss thinks your experience would make for good
publicity for you and your company. He wants you to write a brief proposal
for an article that the company's public relations division can shop around
to magazines in the field.
He wants you to talk about how big the project
was -- 11,000 workers, $4 billion total cost, 110 miles of pipe -- and the
problems you encountered. He also wants you to talk about the technical feat
you accomplished: for the first time, crops are being grown in a once-barren
part of the world.
He's looking for a one-page synopsis that blends
technical information with some of the more exciting aspects of the venture.
Think you can handle it? Remember, use your imagination!