Ever wondered where an Engineering Officer career might take you? Hear from Cassie about what a day in the life of a Design Drafter looks like.
Job Title: Civil Design Drafter
Qualification: Associate Degree of Electrical Engineering
Year of graduation: 2023
5:15am
My first alarm goes off, it’s winter and there will be four more before I finally decide to get out of bed at 5:45am. I jump in the shower before picking my outfit for the day and getting ready for work.
6:15am
Hop in the car for a half an hour drive to work on the M1 and over the Gateway Bridge, I have my favourite Spotify playlist going to set my mood for the day.
6:45am
Arrive at the office and make my way to my workstation for the day to drop my bag off. Before heading over to the onsite café for breakfast, as I was out of bread at home.
7:00am
I say good morning to the few other early birds in the office before logging in and checking in to my desk. After securing that I jump straight into my emails to see if there has been any updates on the projects I am working on or any change to what the day may have in store for me. I have a message from one of the electrical engineers to help her find some drawings for the underground earth grid but otherwise am safe to continue working on the same project as yesterday until they start at 9am and I can get some more information.
7:30am
I open the CAD software we use to do our engineering drawings and continue working on the design of an adapter structure for two circuit breaker in Cairns that are being replaced. The design engineer and I did a site visit to Cairns last week to see the condition of the foundations and if they are reusable as these circuit breakers will only be in for a few years.
9:45am
I catch up with the electrical design engineer asking for help finding the earth grid drawings, it is across six different sites and for one hundred and forty different pieces of equipment. Luckily, I helped the civil design engineer find the civil drawings for this same project and can easily access those drawings and locate where the equipment is at each of the six sites.
10:15am
I jump straight into the drawing management system and go searching for these drawings, this took a while as a few of the items are older than me. I love searching for these types of things as it’s not about using the systems that the business currently using, like numbering, but also investigating old data and trying to find a pattern in older systems. When I crack the code and it leads to finding what I’m looking for, it gives me a rush.
12:00pm
It’s time for lunch, head to the office courtyard with a couple of the other drafters and engineers, they head into the onsite café and I meet them outside. We all sit together and talk about the upcoming weekend, a number of others from other divisions join us and tell us about their weekend plans over the half an hour before we head back to work.
12:30pm
I’m back into searching for the earth grid drawings. I persevere through trying to find the last sites drawings and finally find them.
1:15pm
Time to send these to the engineers, I bundle up all the drawings in one pdf and mark it up in Bluebeam, the software the company uses to work with pdfs. I circle all the equipment, to make it that one step easier for the engineer before sending her an email.
2:00pm
Back to working on the adapter structure for the circuit breakers, I have a few questions on this one and ask another drafter in our team for some advice. We have a chat about electrical clearance heights and discuss how to adhere to them whilst using the same design concept. We then ask the civil design engineer and end up at the senior electrical engineers desk. They log into the camera network and shows us an example of other structures and how the issue has been solved in the past. The civil engineer decided to take the solution on and it’s back to the drawing board for me.
3:30pm
Time to finish up for the day! I log off, pack up my desk as tomorrow is Friday and I’ll be working from home. I love that I have flexibility and control over when my eight hour day starts. By starting at 7am, I am able to finish work earlier and get more out of my afternoon. Which is particularly important to me in winter with the 5pm Brisbane sunsets. Moving from North Queensland twelve months ago, I struggled with losing the amount of daylight in a day the most.
4:30pm
I arrive home, my drive home is usually longer than my drive in but today was a little more congested. My partner and I decide to take the dog down to wellington point for a walk.
4:45pm
It’s low tide at Wellington Point and we haven’t done the walk across to King Island yet. We decide today’s the day (even though it’s a cold winter afternoon and we obviously didn’t think it through). Stanley, the staffy loves the beach and doesn’t know which side of the skinny sand bank to try run into the ice cold ocean on. We hold him back as long as possible before letting him figure out for himself that it is too cold to go for a swim. We almost make it to the island and see the path back getting narrower and decide to turn around and head back to the car.
5:30pm
As we are leaving we notice some people walking ankle deep along the sand bank we have just come from. We just made it in time!
6pm
We arrive home and I start cooking a Marley Spoon recipe for dinner. We have a chicken curry with pineapple rice and settle in for the evening watching an episode of one of our favourite shows Selling Houses Australia.