00:00 And this episode we talk about civil engineering from a civil engineer.
What it really is what they expect in the Major and the five disciplines of the field.
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00:48 And that rise begins by choosing the right major.
I see a lot of engineers asking to define the differences between civil mechanical and
electrical and some of that is clear to a lot of you.
But many scientists this is coming out of high school or they're in undeclared engineering
and university.
They're not really sure what certain pathways are going to be like.
They don't know if civil engineering is for them or one of these other engineering or
so many civil mechanical computer aerospace you have electrical you have biomedical there
are so many different types and says I'm a civil engineer.
I can speak directly to this and talk about what it means to be a civil engineer in school
what to expect from the classes what are the five branches of civil engineering so you
can get excited about potential jobs in this field because it's very wide.
01:39 You can do a lot of different cool things I already did a video about finding your engineering
passion.
So we haven't seen that yet.
Check that out in the top right.
OK here we go.
Civil engineering deals with the design construction and maintenance of manmade and naturally built
environments.
That's important to remember it's not just buildings and bridges guys Civil Engineers
can also work in the natural environment as well because you have environmental you have
coastal you have geotechnical which is a mixed discipline but you may not even deal with
manmade infrastructure within civil.
So remember that and what we are touching on this point I really do want to emphasize
how broad civil engineering is in terms of the five disciplines that's the point of this
video.
You could have a room of Civil Engineers and I can speak to this but if you have a bridge
person and a transportation person and an environmental science person Kosol person
all the same room they may not even know what the other engineers are talking about because
their expertise has gone down this narrow road which is good and if you're specifically
a coastal engineer say you've worked in that for 10 years you don't know anything about
highways you don't need to know anything about bridges and likewise say you are a geotechnical
engineer and you deal with soil foundations or retaining walls.
02:59 You certainly don't need to know anything about coastlines.
You may not need to know anything about bridges you could have peripheral knowledge but it
really is this open SLE where you can combine infused disciplines or go as nice as possible
like what I've done within ITX and transportation and therefore traffic.
03:19 It's really my chain reaction of things civil transportation traffic and then kind
of went into Neish with within traffic it was traffic modeling and forecasting with
big data and aerial stuff as well.
But that's beyond the point.
It's just an example of how you may be a certain type of civil engineer and you could have
25 or more engineers in one room that all do very different things because of the nature
of the industry.
It's not like some fields where if you're this you just work on this one thing.
So you have plenty of options which is pretty good it's a good situation for civil engineers.
So let's kick off the five majors with number one structural engineering.
Of course we'll start with structural because it is the most stereotypical within civil
engineering potentially the most studied discipline within civil structural engineers deal with
the design and analysis of structures which may be buildings bridges highway facilities
they could even be offshore oil rigs they could be underground facilities but it has
to do with a building or some sort of bridge or some sort of dam or some sort of infrastructure
element structural engineering involves the identification of loads and stresses and strain
on these structures and structural engineers are responsible for running calculations on
the materials that are involved and ensuring that this building this bridge this tunnel
this dam whatever it is that your company is working on that your research team is working
on ensuring that this thing is going to stand up ensuring that it can deal with the strain
which is pull which may be found in a bridge environment.
05:03 We are always running analyses on the forces that are involved.
You see me doing these gestures with my hands because you have weight and then you have
force coming off of the ground just like your basic statics environments.
05:15 They must design the structure to successfully hold these loads and withstand the stresses
so that the building doesn't fall down.
The core classes behind structural engineering would be statics structural analysis structural
design Strength of materials.
I specifically took a concrete and a steel bridges design course.
You may also be able to take bridge take electives which are probably grad student classes later
on in your junior and senior year.
But since this is one of the core aspects of civil engineering there's typically many
options of courses for you to take which is pretty exciting.
So if you find yourself staring at structures in all but how bridges actually stand though
and you want to work with the design of overall infrastructure that is beyond a transportation
environment.
06:07 For example highways are always in structural engineering.
Some bridge or a tunnel or a dam that will be structural so if you find yourself interested
in this if you find yourself liking statics as a young engineer than structural engineering
is probably a field for you.
You can go into a bridge you can go into some sort of Neish Avenue within it and stand out
from other engineers.
But this is a very popular very calm in a field that undergraduates code out as they
want to design bridges they want to design stadiums they want to design big buildings
and other sort of impressive facilities to transportation engineering.
Again that is what I am.
I'm a transportation engineer so you may hear my excitement you may hear my bias that is.
Maybe someone intentionally being provided into this video because I really love what
I do.
06:59 I'm happy to be a transportation engineer.
If you go back and watch the Finding Your Passion video you understand why it is that
I chose transportation engineering had something to do with playing Sim City and watching my
colony and watching these two things become fully integrated for the city to sort of wirelessly
hands in an autonomous fashion like an ant colony integrate all the vehicles all the
people all the buildings and signals and really be a modern connected city.
That's why I dreamed about as a high school student Anna wrote papers about this to get
into university.
I wrote papers about this in university which led to my interest in autonomous vehicles.
I love transportation that's been my destiny ever since I was maybe 14 or 15 so there's
a lot for you to do in this field but in a nutshell what transportation engineers are
doing is concerning themselves with the goods movement or people movement within the facilities
of our world and that includes moving them around efficiently and safely as well that's
a very big one.
08:09 Not only do we want people to be able to get to work and freight to arrive to its
destination but we need everything to be safe.
We need roads to be safe we need traffic measures to be safe.
We need to make sure that pipelines switch.
That's a form of freight actually don't rupture and affect the environment.
We need to make sure that cargo planes are falling out of the air so transportation engineers
are always concerning themselves with either people or goods moving from point A to Point
B. And this is a highlight moment where you will see crossover between two fields for
example myself as a transportation engineer and my new role.
08:45 I started about two months ago.
We are a highway people and traffic people and we work heavily with the bridge team because
these two go together.
When you're designing a new bridge you cannot possibly design that branch without transportation
engineers in mine who are telling you what the capacity is for the roadway and what the
speed is that drivers can actually do based on geometric conditions and the bridge people
will say oh well we require this and heavily have to work together and this leads into
the list of knishes within transportation engineering I've kind of already alluded to
many but you have highway design.
You have traffic which does not necessarily mean vehicle traffic.
I want to clear that up right now.
09:29 You could be a traffic engineer and just work with bike traffic pedestrian traffic.
I've heard stories of people getting graduate degrees in traffic who were agricultural people
and all they cared about was livestock traffic through their facilities which is super interesting.
Again you have freight you have engineers who just do facilities designed for airports
and shipyards.
You have it.
Yes Intelligent Transportation Systems which is where I found myself over the last five
six years doing long term modeling and forecasting.
You also have urban planning.
I didn't even mention transit yet you may see bus rapid transit or a high speed rail
in California as a pretty cool project or the next aspect of transit is Hyperloop technology.
I don't know if it's always going to be transit oriented.
I saw some video where cars were submerging under the ground under the highway.
10:20 And then they would go onto another vehicle which would be the Hyperloop underground
tunnel.
You guys don't know about the Hyperloop yet.
Eli Moss wrote a paper about it in 2013 and now several companies are doing their testing
in Vegas.
They're testing in Dubai so that's a cool technology that is transportation engineering.
Keep your eyes on that.
So just like structural you have all these little nice branches of engineering disciplines
within this sub transportation disciplines so you have all these little paths that you
can follow and you can figure out what you like and figure out what makes you tick and
just keep taking classes in that realm.
Maybe you want to go to grad school maybe you want to get your first job in this realm.
But I want to hit on this transportation highlight one more time.
11:03 Part of the reason why it's so cool to be a transportation engineer right now
is it's so heavily linked with data and not all the fields are.
I think it is structural engineering it can become quite cookie cutter unless your company
is using Brimm which is building information modeling or bridge information modeling unless
they're really doing the cutting edge softwares that things like this and you're probably
going to find yourself reading pretty cookie cutter same thing with geotechnical engineering.
I don't know what types of technologies are out that are helping them because I'm not
in that field.
But what's really exciting about transportation is that every driver has a cell phone in their
car and to every car will be connected to infrastructure.
So it really is an exercise on big data.
We know where these people are going.
We know the speeds that they are going.
11:56 So what I really really love about this is that it's in bed with technology transportation
engineering and that is what actually opens up this ITX field and people are using drones
to collect data.
People are using cell phone data to forecast things and getting stuff in real time and
using camera technology to analyze situations.
That's actually how it ended up with all these cameras is using a camera outside of Wilmington
Delaware to analyze traffic with Dr. Jack palaeo shuttle to you.
But this field is so so closely linked to attack that you have a bright future as a
transportation engineer in my opinion unless you find yourself in highway design which
again is pretty cookie cutter because we fully understand super elevations and how to actually
design highways to keep people away and things like this so make sure when you pick your
major has a Lee High School student has a undecided engineering major.
12:55 Just make sure that it's linked in with tech and transportation engineering definitely
3 environmental engineering.
This is the branch of engineering which is concerned with the application of scientific
and engineering principles for the protection of human populations from the effects of adverse
environmental factors.
It also includes the protection of environments at a micro or local level or at a macro or
global level from the negative impacts of humans or the environment itself.
It also concerns itself with the improvement of overall environmental quality.
I'm not going to go on too long about environmental engineering because it's definitely not my
forte.
I certainly never got too excited about it in undergrad.
But here are five different areas within environmental engineering that you could get a job in.
Or you could go to grad school.
13:42 You may find yourself working in solid waste management environmental impact assessment
water supply and treatment wastewater treatment or air pollution management as you can see
is very water resources epicenter environmental engineering utilize a higher regard for chemistry
and biology than other branches.
So
14:04 if you're considering civil and you like biological sciences then environmental
is definitely for you.
Okay moving on for geotechnical engineering geotechnical engineers concern themselves
with everything beneath the ground level and they study the rock and soil that supports
engineering systems meaning buildings or highways or bridge pillars or whatever it may be that
this soil Foundation the rock foundation is beneath.
Regarding some sort of infrastructure so therefore geotechnical engineers work heavily with foundations
retaining walls tunnels slope stability.
They
14:42 use the principles of soil mechanics and rock mechanics to investigate subsurface
conditions and materials determine the relevant properties of these materials evaluate stability
of natural slopes and manmade soil deposits and of course assess geotechnical risk and
I'll say this about geotechnical engineering.
It's
15:00 definitely the most subjective of the five disciplines.
What I mean by that is that it's very very challenging to know what's going on beneath
the soil layers even when you do soil samples and even when you have plenty of data you
just never know what's going to happen.
So some people run from the hills when they hear this and some people are very attracted.
This field when they hear this so there's always some uncertainty there's always a bunch
of unknowns when you were designing geotechnical systems so keep that in mind for your future.
For example if you're interested in engineering you probably can think of several historic
events that have led to things like this.
Most notably the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Engineers miscalculated what was going to happen without soil Foundation and the tower
is totally leaning today.
I think it's something like 11 degrees are very significant clearly because it's famous
because of that.
15:53 Engineers have done all types of support maintenance and there's a bunch of underground
stuff going on I don't think they have cables because it makes it ugly but they definitely
have a bunch of counterweights that are going on in order to save that tower.
Because if you take two engineers one around then or didn't really do their job very well
and own a local know for you.
East Coast people for Delaware people everyone knows about what happened to the Indian River
Inlet Bridge.
They started building the bases the ramps of the bridge to go up and then cross the
Inlet with no foundation.
So it was going to be a big bridge.
But one side settled like three extra feet and they had to fire the engineering company.
16:34 They had to totally do a new design and restart and the state of Delaware originally
sued this company for 19 million dollars and they inevitably settled for like 5 or 6.
But it was a huge blunder and in some ways these are the fears of the threats.
These are the risks of geotechnical engineering in general.
Sometimes you just never know what's going to happen.
So you have to be willing to take that on as a geotechnical engineer.
17:01 And last but certainly not least five coastal engineering coastal engineering is
a study of the processes ongoing at a shoreline or construction within the coastal zone.
The field involves aspects of nearshore oceanography marine geology and civil engineering often
directed at combating erosion of coasts or providing navigational access.
And as I mentioned already I did research with the coastal engineer who was a camera
expert.
He
17:28 used his camera systems to monitor the shoreline to analyze the risk of scours which
can suck out swimmers into the ocean and be a threat to beachgoers and other types of
marine and scour and bridge and shoreline monitoring in general.
17:45 Some other examples of coastal engineering include artificial Harbor generation dredging
operations seawall construction bulkheads Piers and submerged pipelines.
So these are the five disciplines of civil engineering guys.
17:59 I hope this video helps you understand a little bit more about the field how diverse
it is.
It gives you a little bit more ideas of where your career can go so that you can get excited
about being a civil engineer if that's what you think is for you.
I know that any cool job out there awaits you.
18:16 Make sure you hit that subscribe button guys so you don't miss out on more videos.
Thanks for watching the present engineer show guys stay hungry on your quest to become a
perfect engineer.
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