Civil/Construction Management Major...

aibarr
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:26:51 +0000

This is kind of brief, because it’s kind of late, and I kind of have an addendum to issue Thursday…



If it is your first time taking on physics, it might be wiser to take the non-calculus based physics before getting into calculus based physics.



I dunno about that… College non-calc physics is hard, and college calc physics is hard. If you don’t have to take both, and if you’ve taken calc, and if calc physics is required, best to get just the one set of physics-based C’s on the transcript, eh? ;)



I literally gaze in amazement when I see a beautiful structure or bridge. I look at the connections and try to understand why they are shaped a certain way, or the reason for the choice of materials. It’s all pretty amazing to me! Well, I’ve obviously gotten off topic! Any advice or information on your experiences would be great.



Well, sounds like you’re on the right track! That desire to understand and design structures is what makes the best structural engineers, from what I’ve seen. You don’t have to be a math genius to go into any engineering field… You just have to be diligent at it. It’ll ramp up, as all math does, and you just have to be willing to tackle it. Eventually, as seesys says, the math fades out (beware, seesys… it will come back with a vengeance occasionally, particularly in grad school). As my EE PhD candidate brother pointed out today, eventually the math gets so hard that you do the math once, and let the computer take over from there… Same goes for this field.

Internships are great. They’re good resume material. Civ companies like to see people with at least some engineering experience within civ, even if it’s not in the same subdivision of civ.

Keep your eyes on the end result!