Vernon
Q ..
You must have been sort of the career manager then for hydrologists in the Corps in your
position?
A
Bight, I was.
P.rofessional Development Program for H&H
Q ..
Now I know there is a very sophisticated professional development program for scientists
and engineers in the Corps. So when you were beginning, when you were planning a
career for a hydrologists, did you have that in the
Were there enough schools
producing hydrologists that you could get a pretty good selection for interns or trainees
and enough post-graduate course work that you could train these people?
A
Well, as far as hydraulics was concerned, there has always been a good training resource
in the private sector for hydraulics. Maybe not so much on dam design, but on other
phases of hydraulics, but not as much in hydrology. We almost always had to depend on
in-house training of some sort for hydrology background.
At one time, there was a lot of demand for the courses in HEC to be given to private
people, other agencies and so forth. The Corps really didn't have the resources to train
everybody in hydrology. So they started trying to get universities and private firms to
teach some of these courses. It's been quite some time, there have been schools like Penn
State and University of Texas, Colorado State, I think, are probably the ones.
But there are a lot of schools that have courses. Missouri School of Mines is another one,
I think. There are a lot of them that have courses in hydrology and hydraulics both. Some
of the people that worked for the Corps would go to work teaching or they would get a job
with private industry someplace. They would start teaching a course on hydrology and
hydraulics in the summer, usually between the major sessions. There were quite a few
courses available that way. There are, I guess, plenty of opportunities now.
Then they have the program where the Corps would send you away to a graduate school.
This got more attention, and they started sending a lot of people to graduate school. There
were quite a few fellows--I guess some females probably got involved in that, too. I don't
know of any of the females that did because there weren't enough of them, but some of
them got to go away to school for a full graduate degree.
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