Direction for the Future

Now it seems my years of school are paying off. This weekend I was offered a job at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. It's all very exciting. Chelsea and I have often thought that if we were presented with the opportunity to live in Washington, we would take it, and we are going to. Now all I have to do is finish my last semester at school. I will probably start in late August, so we still have some time to get things together after school ends.

Working at the shipyard will be an excellent way to start my career. Training is very important for the Navy and my first three to four months will be spent at different types of training. Also, the nature of the work at the shipyard is very diverse so it will offer lots of different experience. Since so much training is required, they don't like to lose employees and as a result, they tend to be open to allowing engineers to move around to different departments.

As part of the visit we were taken around the shipyard and shown some of the interesting sights. One of the more interesting parts of the tour was a descent into dry dock where a Nimitz class aircraft carrier was getting a refit. The ship was the USS John C. Stennis. (For more info on it go here or here.) We were able to go underneath it. Aircraft carriers, particularly Nimitz class, are enormous. They are more than 1000 feet long and 250 feet wide. When you are under it, it seems much larger than that. The flight deck is four and a half acres.

So now we have some more direction in our lives. This weekend we spent some time cleaning the house and took some stuff to DI. Now we are working towards a date instead of just assuming something will be coming along soon. For now nothing will really change. We just have to finish school and wait for the calendar to do most of the work.