Why do I want to be a Civil Engineer? By Srivishnu Jegan Babu
About 12 years ago, when I won the race with my family to occupy the window seat on a plane from India to Qatar, I had an awe moment during the landing watching the sky scrappers glowing in the morning sun. Indeed, it was a moment of truth for a passionate boy who spent most of the time playing with Lego toys by building various structures and layouts seeing them real. This made me initially anxious then curious to start learning about buildings and other structures. The small spark within me became a burning desire when I moved to Houston in 2012 when I started observing the amazing landscapes, roads, bridges, and various types of buildings.
As a youth, I was always fascinated by the grand infrastructures and that pulled me towards the Lego toys. This curiosity must have been inherited from my father, who was an accomplished design engineer and greatly involved in self renovating our house at every available opportunity. I started spending my time by helping him in multiple small projects at our house like building a separate media room in our backyard. Having free access to his tools and workshop, I was able to initiate my own small projects and grow my engineering abilities by moving from a support role to independently executing small projects such as fixing our own fence, painting the rooms.
When I discussed with my father about converting my desire into a career, he asked me to start reading about how buildings are made to test my confidence in the decision.
What is Civil Engineering?
This made me perform a detailed study on the subject and I came to know there are three main divisions that bring a design into reality, the architects, the structural engineers and Civil Engineers. The following are some of the specialized areas of Civil Engineering:
Structural Engineering - includes all structural analysis and the design of structures
Architectural Engineering – application of engineering principles and technology to building design and construction
Environmental Engineering – To evaluate impacts to cultural resources, noise impacts, threatened and endangered species, water quality, air quality, wetlands, and socio-economic impacts due to projects.
Geotechnical Engineering – It deals with soil and rock behavior in an engineering perspective
Civil Engineers have a wide variety of roles to play such as design and construct buildings such as facilities such as wastewater treatment plants and buildings including skyscrapers, apartments, designing bridges, tunnels, overpasses, to assess environmental impacts etc.
With further analysis, I listened to my consciousness and would like to become a Civil Engineer.
Future
Having a “home” with reasonable amenities is everyone’s dream and with the ever-growing population across the world, developing infrastructure is a necessity and the Civil Engineers will have to play a key role to support the infrastructure development. This was well supported by the recent announcement by The President on the 2 trillion dollars investment on infrastructure projects.
The future economic conditions and regulatory requirements for “Green Development” pose greater challenges on how things being done today, and these adversities will bring greater opportunities for the future generation engineers to come up with environmentally friendly, cost effective designs. Civil Engineering is considered as an evergreen course for aspiring youngsters due to the wide variety of opportunities available across the globe with a possibility to have entrepreneurship start-ups.
Passion being converted into Profession and I am very confident on my decision and given an opportunity will well and excel in the field of Civil Engineering.
References
Green Development LLC. 17 June 2021, green-ri.com/.
Green development LLC. (2021, June 17). Retrieved September 13, 2021, from https://green-ri.com/
https://www.to-engineers.com/blog/different-types-civil-engineering