Civil Engineering Graduate School Advice

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>Here’s what the graduate school I am planning to go lists as their research interests. This is actually what they want their faculty to have expertise in.</p>

<pre><code>* Chemical and biological processes in environmental and water resources systems

  • Interfacing related emerging technologies with applications
  • Risk assessment
  • Computational modeling and analysis of surface and ground water quantity and quality
  • Security and treatment of water supply systems
  • Real-time and adaptive infrastructure management
  • Response simulation using intelligent agents
  • Application of a systems approach to optimization of large scale environmental, water resources, and geotechnical problems
  • Innovative materials development
  • Infrastructure health monitoring, design, and rehabilitation
  • Progressive failure/collapse
  • Dynamic soil-structure interaction under blast, seismic, or impact loading
    </code></pre>

<p>Are there any fellowships available for these research interests? I have biology background as well, would that help? What would these research interests involve?</p>

2

<p>bump…please reply!</p>

3

<p>You are asking in the wrong place. Your Department may well have research or teaching fellowships available. But you will have to ask them about it, not us. If there is some sort of outside funding that you might be eligible to apply for, they will probably know about that as well.</p>

<p>If you want more information about the specific research programs in your department, then again you are asking in the wrong place. Your Department may have a graduate student advisor that you can give you an overview. Or you can talk with individual faculty, or their grad students, directly.</p>

4

<p>OK, here’s the deal with this one… I’m pretty much the only civ around answering questions, and the answer to this question requires some pretty extensive research. You’re just going to have to put in some elbow grease, go to the 'net, check through journals, and talk to professors, like everyone else has had to do, because the fields you’re talking about are so specific that if nobody’s hollered out, “Hey! I know one!” by now, then none of us knows any specific fellowships to point you towards…</p>

<p>The <em>vast</em> majority of fellowships and assistantships are specific to each university. Apply for the NSF fellowships, because they’re highly prestigious, highly lucrative, and highly general (in other words, the government would pay you a lot of money to study more or less what you’d like to study), but at least for your first year, see if you can’t get an assistantship from your university to pursue what you’d like to pursue. Then, once you get established in grad school, chat with your advisor. If anybody’s gonna know fellowships to apply for, your advisor will.</p>

<p>As to your biology background, I don’t know enough about what your biology background entails in order to be able to specifically say, “Oh, yes, that would be a great transition.” Typically speaking, if you’ve run things like computer simulations and studied things like iterative processes in terms of computer programming, that might be helpful. I know that’s really vague, but this is one of those questions that really can only be answered in sitting down with a professor and talking for an hour or so, checking various skill sets that are useful to the professor and seeing whether or not you’ve got any experience in that from your bio background. There’s really no crystal ball out there for this sort of thing… It’s kind of a brute-force examination of various skills that you possess and required skills for each field.</p>

<p>As to the specifics of the various research interests, I could go through each of them and explain what they are, but that’d take a ton of time and I’ve got boxes to unpack. =) Are there any in particular that you find interesting? I’d Google 'em all and get a brief overview of 'em, narrow down to a couple of topics that sound really cool to you, then talk to the professors that specialize in those areas and see what sorts of specifics they deal with in each of those research areas.</p>

<p>Best of luck! Sorry CC can’t be of more help in this case, but I just don’t think that the typical question-answerers have the breadth of experience that’s necessary to answer specifics like these…</p>