In almost all of my projects, I took any building of models or manufacturing of 3D printed parts upon myself. This gave me a lot of experience in the broader sense of manufacturing and design solutions, but more specifically it made me a very skilled Solidworks modeler with an intimate knowledge and know-how of the software.
My time with Solidworks also involved a heavy emphasis on engineering drawings, which I had the opportunity to both create and use for the purposes of manufacturing a proposed design. This education also involved use of AutoCAD for floor plans and more engineering drawings, but Solidworks was most often used.
I've made use of Finite Element Analysis (FEA) extensively during my time at UCSD. This is of course just one program out of many, but the principles of Finite Element Analysis and the following decisions one must make for accurate modeling will remain consistent. Most recently I performed FEA for the "Lunar Boom Tower" project I worked on, which is listed under the Projects tab.
Earlier in my college career I took a class for Steel Design. This involved the purchasing of my own AISC Steel Construction Manual that was employed for the entire class. In addition, many classes after this in Structural Analysis employed I-beam shapes from the manual itself. To build good habits and maintain fmailiarity, I made sure to further personalize my copy of the manual for these questions, and use it as a faster alternative to lecture notes.
I also further employed the manual's use for beams in Aerospace. The equations are the same save for a few alterations to geometric properties and switching out of material properties, and the notes on cross sections in the manual proved useful when deciding cross section parameters of the Lunar Boom Tower.
Particularly I have experience and education in structural repairs involving steel and composites. For steel I was educated specifically in structural analysis of welding as well as plates fastened over a crack, which is simpler version of the Volkerson lap joints I had even more eperience with in repairs of composites. In other words, I'm very familiar with structural repairs of aerospace and civil structures, using composite and metallic materials.
Aerospace Structures pose an interesting challenge, and posit an extreme requirement of precise engineering. To avoid as much weight as possible, the Margin of Safety in aerospace typically tends to be anywhere from 0.25-0.75, with the Safety Factor being around 1.5. However, it remains rare that Structural issues cause the failure of aircraft (aside from the issue of hollow blades in engines sometimes breaking and destroying an engine. I actually wrote a proposal on using Non-Destructive Evaluation methods such as vibrational analysis and ultrasonics to monitor these blades.) When you add that Aerospace structures tend to be complex structures with complex geometries, the challenge becomes even greater. This is what attracted me to Aerospace to begin with.
I'm glad to say I was able to not only be educated in Aerospace structures, but that I also had the opportunity to participate in a couple projects employing what I learned, which I then was able to present to professionals in the industry. This is featured in the Projects tab.
Obviously this is the most important skill to qualify any Structural Engineer. I've spent the past 4 years learning Structural Analysis of all kinds of structures involving combinations of beams, trusses, plates, gusset plates, shear walls, etc. And these structures have themselves involved many combinations of different materials, although usually they've been concrete and steel.
My education has given me the intuition needed to start off designing a structure on the right path, understanding how the structure is likely to fail, with the why and where.