Civil Engineering

Civil Engineering is the oldest and processional engineering fields in the world. This is a major that concerns all the construction design for daily life. As usual, some of people think that the civil engineering is only dealing with the municipal and government construction. The civil engineering includes the transportation, water resources, environmental, structural, geotechnical, earthquake engineering, atmospheric science and land surveying as well. Everyone can’t live without civil engineering, and it likes the people can’t keep alive without water. The civil engineers give human a place to stay, pure water to drink, fresh air to breathe, and the routes reach everywhere in this world. Civil engineering is the basic of the life; also it is a kind of art in the world, such as a building, people can live and work in it, it is also the decoration of this place.

The reason that I selected the civil engineering program for my future career life is that there was a really horrible earthquake in 2008 in China. Probably everybody should hear about it before. It is still the nightmare in my life even though that I was not in that area at that time. There were so many people dead in that natural disaster. Also there were large quantities bad building and design in that area. Large percentage of the building crashed in that earthquake. Children were killed by the structural failure. At that time, I made a decision that I will make the building never fail and do my best to protect more people’s properties and lives. I am so proud of myself is one of the civil engineers. There are only six specified fields in civil engineering department at NDSU. Geotechnical, water resource, environmental, transportation, structural, and material is combined this program. The material is only available for graduate students to do researching.  All the undergraduate students should have all the intro level classes for each field, and after that they must select at least 3 fields in technical electives. That means the civil engineers who graduate from college not only can involve the area they select; also they can do all types of the job related with civil engineering.

The three fields I chose in program are structural, transportation, and water resource. Structural is the best field in civil engineering in my mind. It will deal with all kinds of the buildings, bridges, towers and all the structural-design-in construction. The structural engineers have to do analyzing structural, designing structural, and constructing structural. Structural analysis and design require the students must familiar with the software, the design code, and all the manual of the design.  They should consider all the factors can affect the structures unstable, such as the seismic load, wind load and so on. The safety is the priority purpose in all structural engineers’ mind. The transportation engineers should consider the roads, airports, shipping, and traffic planning. Also, they have more specified classes for each of the part in transportation engineering. Water resource engineering is a part that handles the water quality, watershed, water and wastewater treatment and the subjects all concern the water.  Water is the most important resource in the world. The water resource engineering is working on to get a better water quality and condition, control the water consuming, treat the wastewater to reuse purpose, protect and control the flood. The only class I took from water resource engineering is watershed modeling.