| Fwee! Okay, starting at the top:
1) Yes, civ e's are really in demand. I'm sitting here amid swaths of envelopes, flooding the market with my resume in anticipation of my December graduation from grad school. I'm applying to probably over 100 different companies, and they're all hiring right now. This past week, I sent my resume to one major company and four days later, I found myself in the middle of an impromptu phone interview with the head of the large-span bridge design department and was subsequently invited to fly down to Tampa, Florida, for an interview. Maybe it's that I'm *that* highly qualified, but a lot of that eagerness is because business is good and more engineers are needed.
2) Do I have to put up with a lot of crap...? As in, Office Space sorts of crap? Well, sure. As a grad student! In my experiences in the practical world, though, there's much less of that in the good engineering firms. Generally, you're working in small enough groups that you've got a lot less crap that you have to deal with.
3) Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I use a TON of computer programs. On a steel design exam, working quickly but accurately, I can design a steel beam or girder for a given loading condition in about fifteen/twenty minutes. Consider that a building can have hundreds of thousands of beams and columns and girders and such. I'm not sure who would die first: me, from sitting forever and doing all those calculations, or my client when he saw how much I billed him for my hours. You've got to know how to use the computational tools of the industry in order to help you with those highly iterative design processes, and if you're designing something especially complex that can't be designed by conventional methods, you have to know how to use numerical and computational methods to your advantage in order to design those more complex things. Lots of computerwork involved, pretty much in any design engineering or engineering research/analysis capacity.
4) A PhD is crucial for academic tenure. If you want to be a professor, you need a PhD. So far as industry goes, it can be quite helpful. It varies within the various branches of civil engineering, though... If you're in a very in-demand and highly specialized field, like structural mechanics and fracture mechanics research, a well-trained PhD student can walk out of his/her university with their civ e PhD and walk into a research position at a national laboratory with a starting salary of ~100K. (Not kidding! It's very possible with a PhD from Berkeley or UIUC or one of the other top programs.) So, in that regard, it *can* really help. Perhaps it's less beneficial for those who wish to go into design, but a PhD can give you some valuable tools and insight that can be very useful and sought-after in the practical world.
Those are the long answers to your questions... LOL. Sorry. I was a little more long-winded than I'd intended. |