I hope you are planning to attend the 2016 NCSEA Structural Engineering Summit. I think it is going to be great this year, and I know it will be our highest attendance ever! The dates are September 14 thru 17 at Disney’s Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. …

The concept of resiliency has been a topic of interest in a lot of emails I have received lately. There are two definitions on Dictionary.com for resilience (or resiliency).

1) The power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed, or stretched; elasticity.

2) Ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like; buoyancy. …

Leaders are expected to navigate effectively through a wide variety of social and professional situations with a wide variety of people. More often than not, however, engineering firms promote engineers who are successful at the technical requirements of the job into areas that require skills they haven’t been trained for–leadership, business development, public speaking, and conflict management. …

I’m very excited about the upcoming 2014 NCSEA Conference in New Orleans. This year, we once again focused on putting together a schedule of well-known speakers with topics that the practicing structural engineer can really use, and we continued last year’s practice of offering concurrent sessions that allow attendees a choice between topics. …

The most effective people I know always seem to have time to take care of everything. They volunteer, they exercise, they spend quality time with their families, they seem to do it all! When I was in college, I asked one of my teaching assistants how he made time to do everything that was expected. His answer was simple: “You always have time for whatever you make time to do.” I’ve thought a lot about it over the years and often think about how wise that simple statement is. It really is a matter of deciding what you need to prioritize, and the rest should work itself out. …