A Coffee with… Otak Engineer Sean Clark

Otak is celebrating Engineers Week by sitting down for coffee with Sean Clark, senior project manager and passionate engineer! Check out the video and the transcription below:

“My name is Sean Clark, and I’m a structural engineer.”

What is your role on the structural team?

“I work a lot with architects. I also work a lot with the civil department, and water and natural resources – we do a whole lot of retaining walls on the side of roads, so I work with the transportation department as well.”

“The structure is basically anything in the built environment, and that encompasses different people at Otak, so it’s a wide variety.”

What excites you about the field of engineering?

“What excites me the most I think is the amount of technology and new types of construction. I get really excited when somebody’s like, ‘Ooh, we can use titanium rods to strengthen this girder.’ You know, something different.”

“Elegance in design is efficiency, you know? So, I take pride in being able to give an elegant design to somebody’s problem. One of the interesting ones that I’ve got recently is that we’re doing a rain shed in Hawaii. So, one – it’s Hawaii, and two – the seismic there is just crazy, it’s built on the side of a volcano. It’s really interesting to see how my part is just structures, but to get the water to all these people involves a lot of different disciplines.”

What do you enjoy most about being an engineer?

“I think what I love about engineering is that every day I create. It takes a lot of imagination, it takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of knowledge, but there’s just nothing better.”