<p>hey. which type of engineering are you guys doing? what school are u going to? gender?</p>
<p>U Pittsburgh-
Chemical (most likely) /Electrical/Mechanical(least likely)</p>
<p>Penn State (Schreyers Honors college) Civil</p>
<p>ohh cool. im also doing civil</p>
<p>1) Civil (Structural)
2) Did my undergrad at Rice U, about to graduate with my masters from UIUC
3) I'm a she</p>
<p>If you've got any civ questions, let me know!
-Amy</p>
<p>Ok I have a quick question: How hard is civil engineering? Do you need a masters degree to get a good job?</p>
<p>yeah. i liked to know that too. and do you think after graduating going to a UC doing engineering is more recognized than going to cal poly slo?</p>
<p>Cal Poly SLO > UCs for undergrad.</p>
<p>I also have a few questions. How is the internship process for civil engineering? and, What kind of research could a undergrad perform in relation to civil engineering? Also, how long has does it usually take to obtain a masters degree, and is there any way to accelerate that process?</p>
<p>Whee! Okay.</p>
<p>Answering everyone's civ questions, since I'm the only one on the board here who ever answers civ questions...</p>
<p>1) How hard is civil engineering?</p>
<p>Civil engineering is a ridiculously broad field. I personally think it's bested only by mechanical engineering in breadth. You've got road design, steel structures, concrete structures, flood plain management, traffic flow management, road layout design, hydrology, surveying, dynamics, earthquake engineering, bridge design, engineering mechanics, finite element applications, computer applications... It's a big field, and there are tons of choices.</p>
<p>Since there are a ton of facets to the field, it's really tough to say whether or not civil engineering is "hard". I used to do traffic engineering and signage/striping for a company in Houston, and that's not all that hard. The guy I recommended to replace me actually has a history degree and is doing really well there, so it doesn't require any intensive engineering knowledge and expertise.</p>
<p>On the other hand, structural engineering and engineering mechanics can get way complicated, way fast, if you decide to go to grad school in structures or mechanics. It's no easy feat to design the tallest building in the world when you're having to deal with potential 85-MPH wind speeds, and there's a lot of math and science that goes into it. Tensor calculus: calculus with matrices. Imaginary numbers and differential equations. These are things my ABD-PhD mechanical engineer father reassurred me I'd only have to deal with in DiffEq, and he ended up being quite wrong! I was studying the same stuff in my mechanics course that my PhD-program-in-physics friend was studying, so anything you hear about civ being pansy-arsed is totally wrong.</p>
<p>Civ can be the easiest engineering discipline, but it can also easily rank up there with the highly complex disciplines people think of when you talk about "tough engineering". </p>
<p>2) Do you need a masters to get a good job?</p>
<p>Well, if you're planning on designing the aforementioned tallest-buildings-in-the-world, yes. </p>
<p>It's a good idea to get a masters, anyhow, though. Honestly, it's only one to two more years in school (see below) and I learned almost as much in grad school as I did in undergrad. Your starting salary will be higher and companies that do more interesting work will want to hire you. Some of the really cool companies don't even interview people unless they have a masters degree, so if you want a career instead of just a job, it's worth it.</p>
<p>3) Cal Poly SLO vs UCs</p>
<p>Well... I mean, Cal Poly's better than Riverside, but not as good as Berkeley. What UCs are you choosing between?</p>
<p>4) Internship process for civil engineering</p>
<p>It varies, from person to person. Most of the internships I know about that my colleagues and I have gone through have proceeded a little like this:
a) Student decides to get a summer internship
b) Student sends out resumes and cover letters to companies (the local ASCE chapter is a good place to start, in terms of finding potential employers)
c) Student goes on an interview or two, chooses a place to work for the summer
d) At the end of the summer, student has gained all sorts of cool work-related experience with whatever company they decided to work for. I actually kept working for my company part-time during my senior year, second semester, and made a fair bit of money to furnish my grad student apartment.</p>
<p>The internship process is more or less what you make of it, and it depends upon whether or not your school helps you find opportunities at all. My school didn't, so I had to hunt on my own. Still, I gained a lot of really valuable experience working with bridges and writing for departments of transportation that helped me get my research position at UIUC, so if you have the opportunity to do a co-op or internship, I say go for it, definitely.</p>
<p>5) What kind of research could an undergrad perform in relation to civil engineering?</p>
<p>Well, last semester, I had two undergrad research assistants working for me, pulling various values off of bridge schematics for me, but that's not the most thrilling of research opportunities. It's tough to get into the really, really cool stuff in a university setting unless you're a grad student, or unless you're at a very small program, or an alternative sort of program like Harvey Mudd or something.</p>
<p>6) How long does it usually take to obtain a masters degree, and is there any way to accelerate that process?</p>
<p>Most civ masters degree programs take a year minimum to two years, typically more along the lines of 1 or 1.5 years, to complete. You don't want to accelerate the process, because it's a heck of a lot to cram into a year and a half anyhow. It's fast, it's typically paid-for by the school, and there aren't a ton of reasons why you really ought to accelerate your masters studies, since it's really fast anyhow.</p>
<p>Phew. Think that's it for the time being... let me know if you guys have any other questions.</p>
<p>WOW! Thanks for all that information. It's great to know all this information in advance and I greatly appreciate it.</p>
<p>Any time! =)
Signing off for the night.</p>
<p>wow! thanks alot. um UCSC, and UCD. i think ill enjoy CE.</p>
<p>Penn State-Schreyers
Chemical Engineering-French/chinese</p>
<p>Penn State-(Normal)
Electrical Engineering</p>
<p>Mechanical/Aerospace Engineering-Russian minor
University of Alabama Huntsville
Female</p>
<p>Thanks for the good answers.</p>
<p>Aerospace Engineering major- Georgia Institute of Technology
Astronautical Engineering Masters' dropout :( Purdue University
Geology major - University of South Florida
Planetary Geology/Meteorology, doing my Master's- Arizona State University,
Male</p>
<p>Mechanical Engineering- University of Alberta</p>
<p>Civil Engineering. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Male</p>