It's that time of year again: college kids are coming home and the latest crop of interns are hitting design firms all across the world! I am a big fan of interns, I love the concept of hands-on learning and getting potential employees in the door at little cost. In my decades as a CAD Manager, I've made good use of interns over the years and pulled some really great employees into the firms I've worked for. Fair word of warning to any interns out there though: please separate yourself from your cell phone during work hours! This has been a real problem I've seen over the last few years. Fastest way to make a bad impression on your boss: start texting while he's talking to you (yes, I actually saw it happen!)

Some days, I miss doing architectural work. There is something very satisfying about designing a building with a package like AutoCAD Architecture. When you're done, you have this beautiful structure you can point to and say: "I designed that!" Somehow, pointing to a parking lot and saying "I did that!" doesn't carry the same sense of wonder. Still, I did have an engineer point out to me one day that if an architect does his job well, everyone notices. If an engineer does his, nobody should notice. Engineers only get noticed when things go wrong, and then it's a bad day all around!

Funny how images seem to panic CAD folks. I get that we're used to lines and text --we're vector based creatures-- but images aren't that scary are they? I use Raster Design to insert my images into my drawings for the most part and it's a pretty intuitive process. In the modern CAD world, we all need to move a bit outside our comfort zone and start understanding the process of integrating images into our plans. Give it a try . . . you just might like it!

Change is good . . . sometimes. I don't believe in change for the sake of change, especially in a production environment but when the change is enacted to improve production, then I'm all about it. I've seen a lot of people resisting changes in Civil 3D, such as learning to use Point Groups instead of sorting points by layer. I understand that anything different is going to slow you down at first but CAD folks need to look beyond today's billable time and consider how many hours the process will save you over the next few months, or years. Give change a chance, my CAD Companions! Different does not automatically mean slower or bad!