Career By Design

Civil Engineers are involved in many fields. How do you pick the right one? Please use this thread to ask any questions related to choosing a discipline. Or share how you selected your field.     

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Tirza Austin
Manager, Online Community
American Society of Civil Engineers
1801 Alexander Bell Drive
Reston, VA 20191
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Civil engineering has many fields and you can select  according to your knowledge.  For example there are the various options you could have selected:

1. planning engineer 
2. structure  engineer
3 quantity surveyor
4 design engineer 
5 site engineer.
6. project coordinator
7. quality controller

According to your  base, you have selected anyone field. I can also explain deeply but now we have some work therefore we end here. 

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Pankaj Jha S.M.ASCE
Student
Delhi
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Hi Tirza, 

Thanks for this fantastic thread!

First I'd like to refer to the CEBOK, which specifies seven technical outcomes for CEs, among others Management, Economics, Design, etc. Yet I want to emphasize on another outcome, the Breadth of CE(ing), which requires CEs to possess the knowledge of at least four specialty areas. (The areas could be directly related to the ASCE institutes, journals and committees, etc.)

As far as my education in Cost Engineering, my field working experience and my interest in construction are concerned, I decided to go after Construction Engineering. Regarding on the breadth, I might not choose the "huge" ones like Structural or Geotechnical. Instead, I found the two specialty areas covered by ASCE journals (Structural Construction; Legal Affairs) are more interesting and, more importantly, easier-to-acquire. I still need identify another specialty areas as the fourth, strictly speaking.

Best luck to this topic! I couldn't be more happy to know other CE's choices and thoughts!



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James, Wang, M.ASCE
Senior Cost Estimator
Turner & Townsend
Shenzhen, China
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We will be hosting a virtual roundtable to discuss choosing the right civil engineering discipline as an undergraduate student on Thursday, August 19th at 3pm ET. I hope you can join us. Register here!

We've looked at some of the responses on this thread to formulate questions for the panel. Please feel free to add more questions to this thread! ​

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Tirza Austin
Manager, Online Community
American Society of Civil Engineers
1801 Alexander Bell Drive
Reston, VA 20191
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