Career By Design

As the new semester begins, many college graduates can offer advice and helpful tips that we wish we knew during our years in college.

Please check out this video for some tips that I think are helpful for engineering students.
8 Tips for Engineering Students

What are some tips you wish you knew while you were in college?

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Daniel Bressler EIT, A.M.ASCE
Junior Engineer
Brooklyn NY
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I found these three are very helpful:
- Spend 15-30 mins before class going through lectures first and prepare 1-2-3 questions that you might have. After the lectures, doing the homework or assignment right away when everything is still fresh in your mind. Doing this I didn't have to spend that much time study for midterms or finals.
- Form a small group to study together: you learn so much faster and remember longer by helping each others.
- Learn a programming language (R or Python): not sure about other tracks but this is incredibly useful for water resources engineering/modeling. Writing simple scripts will speed up many manual work several folds and more importantly greatly reduce human errors (provided that you carefully QC your script before running).

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Tung Nguyen, PhD
Jacobs, Water Resources Engineer
Sacramento, CA
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One thing I think students need to know is that it is beneficial both personally and professionally to be involved in organizations both in and out of engineering. Things like Engineers Without Borders, campus ministry, Chi Epsilon, mentoring, reading buddies, language exchange partners, study abroad, and even teaching swim lessons all helped me be more well-rounded and came up in interview questions. 
College isn't just about gaining the knowledge needed for your specific field. It is also about learning how to approach problems, how to consider things from new perspectives, and developing skills needed to contribute to society.

If you leave college with a 4.0 but have done nothing but sit in your room and study, you don't necessarily have an advantage over someone with a 3.5 that took advantage of the other opportunities to learn and volunteer in college.

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Heidi Wallace EI,P.E.,M.ASCE
P.E.
Tulsa OK
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Thank you so much. It's very helpful.

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Martin Junior Fouefack Feudjo S.M.ASCE
Civil engineer
Chandigarh
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