Civil engineering is one of the most rewarding fields a person can choose to go into. Everyday your job is to go to work and create things for the public. Waking up every morning and making the world a better place is one of the number one things employees value in the workplace according to Forbes. Students considering becoming a civil engineer should look at these top five reasons that being a civil engineer can be a great choice, and since we realize it isn’t fair to only list the positives we also listed five cons of being a civil engineer.
THE GOOD
Engineers can Explain how the World Works
An engineer’s 4 years of college (if not more) are not spent idly. While in school aspiring engineers learn about the equations and mechanics that dictate the world. By the time an engineer is finished with their four years they have the skills to put together advanced loading systems such as bridges, or design traffic systems for major cities. Which, if you ask me is the coolest and most important things someone could learn about!
People Assume you Know What you are Doing
Family members will always be asking for advice on how to fix their computers or asking for help around the house. This is nice at first because family and friends assume you know about everything, but in the long-term it becomes a negative when your older family members keep asking you to fix things that you may have never worked with before. From personal experience I have an aunt who constantly asks for computer help and I only know enough about computers to just barely get by (EVERYONE assumes you know about computers as an engineer). While it may feel rude to keep having to tell friends and family that you can’t help them. It feels way better to be able to solve people’s problems that they may have been having for weeks.
Your Coworkers are all Just as Smart
One of the biggest benefits of working as a professional civil engineer is the coworkers. Everybody in an engineering office has spent years honing their skills and it shows. There is a reason that civil engineers are called in to consult on a wide variety of projects that involve managing multiple disciplines. Being in a workplace where everyone is functioning at the top of their game and working on exciting new infrastructure makes for workdays that go by fast, and after a full week of work everyone can grab drinks and have stimulating conversation.
Learning Becomes Second Nature
Even if you find a topic you have never worked with engineers have the skills to learn the main ideas of topics in a reasonable amount of time. Getting through engineering school means that engineers have the superpower of picking up topics from scratch, because after four years of struggling to grasp material engineers focus in on the most effective way to learn the major concepts without worrying about the minutiae of topics.
At the end of the Day you Know you Made the World a Better Place
Even on a civil engineer’s worst week they go to bed knowing that whatever project they are working on will help improve the world. Unlike most other kinds of engineers, where there is a large private sector that doesn’t work with the public, civil engineers almost exclusively work with the public. Even in a private company 95% of work going up for bid is for public projects. This means that anything built is helping improve society. Civil engineers projects don’t only make people’s lives better, but they also help protect people from the less attractive parts of daily life such as; sewage systems, stormwater management, environmental safety, and making sure roads are as safe as possible.
THE BAD
Work can be Feast or Famine
Working as an engineer means that you begin on a project and finish work up to a point and turn it in to the client for review. This creates a system where engineers have a couple weeks of consistent work followed by a week of cramming to finish the submittal, and then a period of time where there is nothing to do until the client comes back with comments. This is fine but it can feel bad sitting around looking for something to do, and the week before a submittal can destroy your social life with my personal longest week being over 80 hours of work.
Paperwork can be Monotonous
While seeing the finished project is one of the most satisfying parts of being an engineer it can be a hard fought battle to get there. From putting together spec BOOKS (yes I said books) to putting general notes into sheets 90% of what engineers do is paperwork. It takes a lot of patience to pour over a 200 page document and check for any errors, or checking other people’s plan sheets for quality assurance and then back checking that they made the appropriate corrections. After a long week it can be incredibly frustrating to go back to your coworker and have them make the same correction that you already told them to make.
You Work Long Hours
As mentioned earlier engineers can become incredibly busy working upwards of 80 hours per week. This is an accepted part of the field and creating a good work life balance is as essential as it is challenging. I find that at the end of a long week it is important to meet up with non engineers for a fun night and focus on having fun followed by at LEAST one day to recharge before working again.
You Mentally Correct Physics Errors in Movies
While we all understand how annoying it is when people go into movies to criticize them, but it is just as annoying going to the new superhero movie and seeing the laws of physics spit on. After surviving engineering classes It’s not because we want movies to strictly to adhere to reality but because we realize that there are ways to make a movie look really cool that could exist in a much more realistic world (i.e. Interstellar).
Your Friends Won’t Know how Cool you Are
As civil engineers most people don’t know exactly what we do. Even if they did it’s rare that someone is driving on a road or flushes a toilet and then takes a second to appreciate all the effort that goes into daily conveniences. Structural engineers generally are considered the most flashy because they design skyscrapers and other super structures, but even they don’t win because architects are usually the ones that get the credit. All of this is fine though because at the end of the day civil engineers do what they do for the love of the job.
*Bonus positive*
Seeing the Finished Product
As a civil engineer the best feeling in the entire world is seeing something you designed in the world. After hours of hard work and fighting to fit everything into the design parameters laid out by the client it is a massive relief to see your designs come to fruition. Being able to see the little quirks of a design and knowing all the intimate details about a project that only you could know about as the designer. Any doubt you ever had about your career choice goes away in that moment and you realize why being a civil engineer is the coolest job in the whole world.
The STEM 