Kent has been visiting ship yards since his days in the boy scouts and has since grown a career out of his interest. He has been helping his country for years and is now here to help you with some advice on how to dive into the field.
Transcript
>> My name is Kent Sturgeon. I am a waterfront supervisor for the Piping and Mechanical Submarine Branch at Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia. My job on a daily basis consists of coming in, looking at outstanding problems that we have, determining what their priority is within the shipyard, in order to meet specific goals that they're trying to meet on different projects, and then managing the individuals in my code, and trying to make sure we get those problems answered in a timely fashion. A sample of my typical day, come in, review those outstanding problems that we have, put together a list of what those things are, have a meeting with our group leads within the codes that are the system matter experts on different systems within a submarine, manage those issues, try to figure out when we're going to get them done, are there any things that are holding us up, such as material, or concurrences from other codes within the shipyard. It's also then helping manage those people, answering questions from the projects. Projects will call up with additional issues. Some of them may be brand new that are on fire that are stopping a job on the deck-plate level. So we'll need to send individuals down to go do a ship check, or go troubleshoot something that has come up. And then part of my job also entails making sure that our second shift and follow-on shifts get the correct information for things that they may need to follow up on later on that day, or to provide them with work so that they can be productive, and so that we can get the assets overhauled and returned back to the Navy. In general, you know, I work about a 9- to 10-hour day. I like to get in early when there's nobody there. I can kind of focus on what I need to get done. It also allows me to get everything together that my coworkers need in order for their jobs efficiently. Due to our security clearances and a lot of the programs that we need, there's not really the ability to work from home. In general most of my time is spent in the yard doing work. There are certain aspects within the Navy where you do travel quite a bit to support different boats that you work on. Working on submarines they're usually pretty guarded as far as where they do home courts, or do port visits when they're overseas. A lot of our work if we're going to go overseas is for emergent repairs. The boat will be out on deployment, something breaks, it needs to be fixed so that the boat can continue on its deployment. So we'll send teams to go out to do that. Most of our travel consists of going to other naval bases, whether it be the naval base there in Norfolk to places in King's Bay or our training unit down in Charleston, to support either upcoming availabilities for ships coming into the yard, or to do repair work at those facilities. [ Silence ]
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