List of Contributions

Mr. Irfan A Alvi, P.E., M.ASCE

Alvi Associates, Inc.

Contact Details

Alvi Associates, Inc.
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Mr. Irfan Alvi, P.E., M.ASCE


Alvi Associates, Inc.

My Content

1 to 20 of 37 total

RE: How are engineering firms handling the coronavirus situation?

Posted By Irfan Alvi 03-21-2020 09:57 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
In my firm, we came to the conclusion that teleworking is currently the only reliable way to prevent transmission of the virus between co-workers. Current estimates are that about half or more of the people who are infected and contagious have minor or no symptoms, which may resemble colds and flus, ...

RE: Ask Me Anything: ASCE President-Elect Official Nominees

Posted By Irfan Alvi 03-16-2020 01:35 PM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
I'd like to know the thoughts of the nominees on how ASCE can provide leadership for the civil engineering community to assist the nation and the world in dealing with the current coronavirus pandemic and being better prepared for future pandemics. ------------------------------ Irfan A. Alvi, P.E., ...

RE: How are engineering firms handling the coronavirus situation?

Posted By Irfan Alvi 03-13-2020 10:22 PM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Tona, Thanks for sharing that link. Here's another analysis which reaches the same conclusions: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-answers-covid-19/. Totally agreed that we need to immediately take much stronger action, similar to what China and Italy have done, to block or ...

RE: How are engineering firms handling the coronavirus situation?

Posted By Irfan Alvi 03-12-2020 11:40 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
I think there's a lack of understanding, and maybe denial, about the magnitude of this problem, and so far engineers don't appear to be an exception to that. The lack of responses so far in this thread reflects that. Here's a perspective on the dynamics of the situation which engineers should be able ...

How are engineering firms handling the coronavirus situation?

Posted By Irfan Alvi 03-11-2020 09:53 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
I'll ask the question which is on many people's minds: how are engineering firms dealing with the coronavirus situation? With no vaccine for this novel virus available for at least a year and no large-scale lockdowns in the US yet, I'm expecting that the situation will get substantially worse before ...

RE: Resumes and Age Discrimination

Posted By Irfan Alvi 03-09-2020 10:05 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Michael, To clarify my comments, the applicants who we judged to be overqualified all had management experience, and didn't indicate that they had an interest or willingness to work in non-management junior and mid-level engineer positions. They typically sent in their resumes without a cover letter ...

RE: Resumes and Age Discrimination

Posted By Irfan Alvi 03-07-2020 11:04 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Sometimes the issue is simply that the applicant is overqualified for the position being advertised, rather than an age issue. We've sometimes received resumes from people with 15+ years of experience for positions which were clearly specified as needing say 0-5 years of experience. Those overqualified ...

RE: Weigh in on the merits of a proposed post-P.E. certification program

Posted By Irfan Alvi 02-27-2020 08:41 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
If a post-PE certification is properly designed to confirm expertise in a well-defined specialty, I believe it's of benefit to the engineers who have the certification, their clients, the engineering profession, the public, and continuing education providers. Win-win for all parties, except those engineers ...

RE: How can the (civil) engineering profession influence licensure exemption organizations to value licensing and what are the possible value propositions to the organization?

Posted By Irfan Alvi 02-13-2020 08:41 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Beyond differences in licensing and certification, medicine differs from engineering in several important ways: Doctors need to go to four years of medical school after getting their Bachelor's degrees. The workload in medical school is very heavy. After medical school, doctors need to ...

RE: How can the (civil) engineering profession influence licensure exemption organizations to value licensing and what are the possible value propositions to the organization?

Posted By Irfan Alvi 02-01-2020 09:32 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Jesse, Regarding the masters degree, over the years, my firm has hired many engineers with the masters degree, and many with only the bachelors degree. In comparing these groups, we haven't found any correlation between their degree (or the university where the degree was obtained) versus their demonstrated ...

RE: How can the (civil) engineering profession influence licensure exemption organizations to value licensing and what are the possible value propositions to the organization?

Posted By Irfan Alvi 01-31-2020 09:56 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
After talking with some people and thinking about it further, I currently favor the following approach: Make the PE license based on a breadth exam (no depth component). The exam could be 1 or 2 days. The exam shouldn't need to be periodically retaken. For specializations such as general ...

RE: How can the (civil) engineering profession influence licensure exemption organizations to value licensing and what are the possible value propositions to the organization?

Posted By Irfan Alvi 01-15-2020 12:35 PM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Stephanie, I believe it would be in the best interest of our profession and society to set the bar higher for PE licensing, certification in subspecialties, continuing education, etc. The percentage of civil engineers who have a PE, and the passing rate for the PE exam, are too low, and yet having ...

RE: How can the (civil) engineering profession influence licensure exemption organizations to value licensing and what are the possible value propositions to the organization?

Posted By Irfan Alvi 01-15-2020 11:36 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Heidi, Your points are well taken. I did a survey of several engineers in my firm who recently took the PE exam, and here are the results: Their typical time spent studying for the exam was about 100-200 hours. With respect to the question "On a scale of 0 to 10, how useful was your ...

RE: How can the (civil) engineering profession influence licensure exemption organizations to value licensing and what are the possible value propositions to the organization?

Posted By Irfan Alvi 01-15-2020 11:35 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Yance, I agree with all of your points regarding continuing education. A requirement to retake the PE exam periodically would be one way to help ensure that engineers are getting useful continuing education, and that would in turn shape the kind of continuing education which is available. ---- ...

RE: How can the (civil) engineering profession influence licensure exemption organizations to value licensing and what are the possible value propositions to the organization?

Posted By Irfan Alvi 01-14-2020 08:38 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Dwayne, One thing I've learned from the discussions about PE licensing is that there's a lot of variation in the breadth and depth of education, training, and experience that civil engineers are getting. Over the past three decades, my career has been mainly in the transportation and dam sectors, ...

RE: How can the (civil) engineering profession influence licensure exemption organizations to value licensing and what are the possible value propositions to the organization?

Posted By Irfan Alvi 01-10-2020 07:47 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
I agree that experience and references are important prerequisites for obtaining a PE, but I don't consider them to be substitutes for passing a standardized test. Some engineers have experience which sounds good on paper, but in actuality it doesn't provide sufficient breadth and depth of knowledge ...

RE: Speed of News of Failure

Posted By Irfan Alvi 01-07-2020 08:41 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Chad, You've asked good questions. I've been studying structural failures throughout my career of three decades so far. It's hard to measure the impact of these failures on the profession, but my sense is that, while media coverage of failures does generally have some impact on the profession, ...

RE: Unlicensed engineers working for licensure exemption organizations

Posted By Irfan Alvi 01-04-2020 04:10 PM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Dwayne, I too have often wondered about the comparison between engineering versus law and especially medicine. To summarize, and add to, what has already been noted about medicine: To apply to medical school, doctors have to take an MCAT exam after completing their undergraduate degree. ...

RE: Unlicensed engineers working for licensure exemption organizations

Posted By Irfan Alvi 01-02-2020 11:21 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
In my firm, dozens of engineers have taken the PE exam over the years, and all but two of them passed it on their first try. I don't think we should be doing things to lower the bar for passing the PE exam. Rather, to increase the passing rate, I think we should address gaps in undergraduate education ...

RE: The Gender Wage (and Workforce Participation) Gap in Civil Engineering

Posted By Irfan Alvi 12-12-2019 05:51 PM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
I had a look at the SE3 study report. The study does make a good effort to use statistical analysis to make apples to apples comparisons. Here's the content from page 52, in which I've bolded some things: "Despite gender pay gaps favoring men in nearly all bivariate analyses noted in Chapters ...