<p>I'm a sophomore in high school and after being undecided for a while on whether i should major in accounting/financing or in mech. engineering i've come to the decision to go civil engineering lol.</p>
<p>But my question is, do civil(planning on going structural later) actually design and build bridges/sky scrapers or more or less take the architects designs and work the structural;/material details out?</p>
<p>I really want to develop bridges and sky scrapers (i love making model bridges :D) but i realized that architects might be the ones who do all the designing. I don't want to design bridges/buildings that have already been built but i want to be like those guys who design new innovative stuff like santiago calatrava and the skyscrapers in Dubai. But, if structural engineers are more geared towards working with materials and such for a design made by an architect, I think i'll want to go mechanical or electrical. </p>
<p>Also do engineers as a whole work a lot/work in teams? I know you can't generalize but i would hate to have a job that's boring and lonely.</p>
<p>PS: yeah, i pretty much don't know anything about engineering as a whole, so some of the stuff i said was probably false, but i just want to get to know what each type of engineer does i guess. Thanks :)</p>
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if structural engineers are more geared towards working with materials and such for a design made by an architect, I think i'll want to go mechanical or electrical.
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<p>Structurals' jobs are to take the pretty pictures that architects design and figure out a way to usher it into reality. We design the skeleton, they design the visual idea of the structure. I think what I do is more interesting... Also, if you're good at what you do, there's much less luck involved in actually getting an interesting job (as there is in architecture... there's a much lower ratio of good jobs to architects than there is with good jobs to structural engineers), and the pay's better for most structurals than it is for most architects. I didn't want to draw a picture of a ridiculous building and then hand it off to someone else to make the impossible possible, I wanted to do it myself. I also liked math and science and actual engineering, and there's not a lot of engineering that architects do... Most architects I've met and have asked have considered themselves more artist than scientist, and I prefer to be on the science side, taking things that are infeasible and figuring out a way to actually make it work. This gig is part-Imagineer, and that's what I like about it.</p>
<p>I think it's cool, but it might not be your cup of tea.</p>
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Also do engineers as a whole work a lot/work in teams? I know you can't generalize but i would hate to have a job that's boring and lonely.
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<p>Lots of design teams, though. I'm working in a team of five right now. Lots of consulting with one another, etc.</p>
<p>I'm not sure architectural engineering would be the best major for the OP.</p>
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Architectural Engineering refers to the collective efforts of many engineering disciplines which are necessary to turn the architect's building concepts into reality. These disciplines include structural, building mechanical, electrical, lighting, fire protection and construction.
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aibarr: How much math and physics do you use in your job?, do you get to use most of what you learned in college?
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<p>Definitely get to use a lot of what I learned in college in my job... Maybe not all the theoretical stuff every day, but I had to learn the theoretical stuff in order to really, <em>really</em> understand the implications behind all the equations that I use every day. Also, a lot of the more obscure stuff doesn't pop up every day, but I'm actually pretty surprised by how often I use random things from my courses that I never figured I'd need again. I kept all my notes and all my textbooks, and occasionally have need to refer to them.</p>
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Re: architectural engineering
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<p>The unfortunate thing about architectural engineering programs is that employers never really know whether to consider its graduates as architects or as engineers. Too often, the answer from the employers is to consider them as jacks of both trades, masters of neither.</p>