Tell me about the day in the life of a civil engineer..?

Question

Im majoring in civil engineering (still lower division) and obviously this request is very broad and general, but try and give me at least a summary of what your job is like. Thanks so much

Answer 1

I get into the office around 8 am, I sit down and turn on my computer, while my computer is booting up, I go to the break room and get a cup of coffee and chit chat a little bit with my coworkers on how the economy sucks and which companies are laying off civil engineers.  Then I go back to my desk and check emails and reply to them, then I go to the morning meeting to go over the only two projects we have and hope that we get more work coming down the pipeline.  then I go back to my cubicle and look over the check prints and drawings and do some hand calcs on the concrete and rebar then check it against the Excel sheet.  By the time I get finished with that it is lunch time and I have lunch in the break room.  Then we have a continuing education lecture since nobody has a lot of work to do and we have a lot of down time so the bosses fill up the day with classes.  Then I go back to my desk and fix the mistakes the CAD guys always make on their drawings.  Then I go home and go to the gym and start all over again the next day.

People like to think that Civil Engineers spend a lot of time in the field but in reality they don't, they are too busy doing the design and checking and rechecking and rechecking all the numbers and calcs because if you make a mistake and they build it to your design, then you are liable and in some cases you can be thrown in jail if your design ends up killing people at the very least you will lose your license and job and never work in civil engineering again.  Just take a look at the Hyatt Regency walkway failure.

http://ethics.tamu.edu/ethics/hyatt/hyat...

Yes you will be able to go out to the site every once and awhile but it is very infrequent.  The only Civil Engineers that go out to the site a lot are the Construction Managers and the Project Managers and the Construction Engineers.  The majority of the Civil Engineers I know stay in the office most of the time unless they are CE managers and have to go to public meetings, permitting meetings and meet with clients or go out to drum up more business.

Right now is a sucky time to be in Civil Engineering because there are a lot of people getting laid off and many companies are not hiring because of the economy.  That and Civil Engineers are some of the lowest paid type of engineers out there.  Unless you love Civil Engineering, I would suggest going into another field of engineering like biomedical engineering.  That is a new hot field and there is a lot of growth potential since there are not a lot of people in it and they get paid a lot better than civil engineers.