In this episode Sam talks about what led him into civil engineering and then eventually in 3D visualization as part of public outreach.  Transcript:     Me and my brothers there were four of us close in age and we were each assigned one de facto and mine was Donatello and Donatello was the inventor of course. And so, I was the inventor and I wanted to grow up and be an inventor and so I told this to my dad and he said well in the real world inventors are engineers. And so that kind of stuck with me as I grew up and as I started to get into college and take career aptitude tests. I quickly learned that engineering kind of would fit my personality at least that. I thought at that point and the aptitude tests pointed me in that direction and I really liked Legos Lego Mindstorms at the time. I liked things like robotics. At least I liked imagining how they worked. I guess. I wasn't building them much myself other than the Lagos. And so I I headed to my mind that I was gonna grow up and be an engineer and eventually that evolved into being a mechanical engineer, so I went to school at UNLV and I was a couple years into study my studies as mechanical engineering and I went to. Me with a counselor and they said that in Nevada if I wanted to stay in this area that I wanted to that there's not a lot of opportunities for mechanical engineers. And I had gotten married my wife's from Nevada as well and so we decided the council recommended that I should look into civil engineering and so I did that and I eventually switched my major into civil engineering. And so fast forward to 2010 and I graduated with a degree in civil engineering. And. Up to this point I didn't really know what engineers did and growing up in my small town. I didn't know any engineers and so all I knew of engineering was kind of what my studies would at what I learned in my studies in school. But one thing that became a big part of my studies was 3D modeling. So I started messing around with Sketchup. It was Google Sketchup at the time and then a friend got me into Revit which was part of the Autodesk Suite by that point and so I started playing around with 3D modeling and I really enjoyed it. And so I would spend much of my time for school projects even even on presentation projects doing 3D modeling and trying associate it with my projects, for example, if I had to do some sort of calculations like let's say structural calculations. I would model the beam and I would model arrows and I would say what the answers were using the beginning of the arrows. I would do modeling projects for other people if they were doing projects. For my senior design competition. They were building the Patsy Tillman Bridge the Hoover Dam bypass Bridge at the time and so we decided to make an officer observation deck for it and so I spent almost the entire project making a 3D model of the bridge and then of the deck and making renderings of it. And did that for some of my friends that ended up beating us in the senior design competition? They were doing a bamboo orphanage a bam creek orphanage. Bamboo reinforced concrete I think is the way it's framed So I did some models about that would look like and they ended up beating us. So I did all this modeling and I didn't stop to think of maybe I wasn't interested in the actual engineering and the calculus and all that stuff but I so I continued on the path of engineering I graduated right during the worst part of the recession was fortunate to get a job at Nevada Department of Transportation. As a rotating engineer, there were hundreds of people that applied and they gave two positions out and I was one of them fortunately and so I had this. Wonderful opportunity to get an entry-level position with a department that had all sorts of options for civil engineers. And so as pretty excited about that the problem was I it wasn't long into that career path that I realized that engineering was about the farthest thing away from what I actually wante