It’s National Construction Week! When we think about construction, we often think of construction workers on job sites. It’s easy to forget that behind every structure you see, there is a team of drafters and engineers who designed and built the plans on paper first. One of those draftsmen is our Drafting Technology alumnus Bryan Busby. Bryan is a Bridge CAD Designer with HDR, a global architecture, engineering, environmental, and construction firm. His team in Tallahassee focuses on large-scale highway and bridge projects for state and federal agencies.
When he began the Drafting Technology program in 2010, Bryan was working in welding and fabrication, a skill he picked up in high school. As a welder, he built beams for high-rise buildings from drafters’ plans. That experience gave him a unique insight for his current drafting work. “When I sit down to create plan sets, I can look at them from a perspective of somebody in the field. I can ask myself, ‘Does this work? Will it be challenging? What will they expect to see?’” When he is building bridges on paper or a computer screen, he keeps those workers out in the field in mind. “Those guys may be hundreds of feet in the air building rebar cages for the bridges. Everything has to fit together properly.”
Bryan specializes in concrete bridges, which require a tremendous amount of reinforcement in the form of steel bars that are concealed by the concrete itself. “That’s where the majority of my work is, there in the complex reinforcing elements.” A bridge project can take months or years from inception to completion. He stays engaged in these long-term projects by getting lost in the work. “It’s intensive, it demands your full focus, and that just works well for me. I like to take on big projects and just focus singly on the task at hand.”
This year, Bryan won a Gold Pathfinder award for Creativity and Innovation for using AutoCAD’s dynamic blocks feature in an inventive way to increase productivity on a project. He credits his SRTC instructor Ralph Griffith for helping to inspire his unique technique. Recalling a lesson from his time in the Drafting Technology program, Bryan developed a method for using dynamic blocks that was soon adopted by team members in his own department and throughout other departments of his organization.
“Ralph was and is a great instructor and a great person,” Bryan said. “It’s crazy how full-circle this came. When I applied here at HDR, I learned that my supervisor sits on the Drafting Technology advisory board for SRTC. Unbeknownst to me, my supervisor immediately went to Ralph to ask if he remembered me a as a student. Thankfully, he did!” Ralph remembered Bryan as an impressive student and was thrilled to recommend him for the job. Thanks to his industry expertise and innovative ideas, Bryan now serves on the program’s advisory board himself.
After SRTC, Bryan continued his education at Tallahassee Community College and then went on to Florida State University’s Civil Engineering program. There, he plans to complete the bachelor’s-to-master’s pathway with intentions of becoming a Bridge Engineer. Bryan is proud of his industry, and looks forward to a long and successful career in drafting and engineering. “I’ve always been a structures guy, but you have to think: Your phone, your refrigerator at home, so much of what you use every day was built by plans that somebody put together. This whole world we live in is built by drafters and engineers.”
If you are interested in a career like Bryan's, but sure to check out our School of Industrial Technology: https://southernregional.edu/college-catalog/current/colleges/school-of-industrial-technology