Book Description: For some, a job is just a way to pay the bills. But when a career fits one’s passions and personalities, work can be a source of great satisfaction and success. From Sundaes to Space Stations is designed to help you discover the wealth of opportunities within civil engineering.

Brockman’s upbeat and engaging writing explains the differences between civil engineering and architecture; engineers, scientists and inventors; and what it means to be a civil engineer today in practical terms.

You will learn:

• about the many different types of civil engineers such as geotechnical, environmental, structural, transportation and traffic engineers,
• what civil engineers do everyday,
• about civil engineers that work in law firms, underwater, hanging off of buildings, in wastewater, at the ocean, and inside of freeways and tunnels,
• how civil engineers apply the engineering design process, and
• how to get started in this exciting career.
  

The inspiring real-life stories of civil engineers passionate about making change in the world can help you match your interests to one of the myriad of civil engineering pathways, and find a lifetime of gratifying work and success.

The Wide, Wide World of Civil Engineering

Civil engineering involves our built environment.

Infrastructure is anything we build that is part of our environment, and how we crazy humans collect stuff, protect ourselves, fuel up, or deposit waste. Tunnels, pipes, mines, and shafts poke through the planet in various directions, and we have also buried many utility conduits, pipes, and cables. Actually, the bottom of most of the structures stick into the planet’s surface at least a little.

Now let’s move onto the earth’s surface. Imagine that the world is made up of places, connections between places, and things that make places work. For the most part, the surface of the earth is either water or land (or some mix of both).

Water: The people that live and work on the water part of the world can be supported by simpler infrastructure. The places that need more built structures are underwater places and offshore drill rigs. Compared to the number of people who live in cities and towns on the land part of the earth’s surface, very few need structures built on the oceans to support them.

Land: Every person who lives on land uses the water to connect between places, We also build canals, underwater tunnels, or bridges to connect land on either side of the water. On occasions, civil engineers solve unique problems with unique solution such as the bridge built to carry one river over another in Magdeburg, Germany.

We build near shorelines to protect communities from the natural hazards that come from the sea. We build wharves, dams, seawalls, causeways, bridges, culverts, tunnels, jetties, dikes and many other structures to get around at the water’s edge without falling in. And those beautiful beaches we love so much? Many wouldn’t be half as beautiful without the tender loving care and efforts of a civil engineer.

And finally, about the infrastructure that you see above the ground on terra firma. There are skyscrapers, homes, businesses, and roads connecting them. Utilities are strung over the land—sewer pipes, electric cables, and towers. The more buildings there are, the more roads and utilities are needed to support the people who live and work there.

But, much of what mankind has created on this planet cannot be detected by simply looking. These are the systems that have been created in countries all over the world to control things or share information. Roads and other transportation systems (planes, boats, trains, you name it) have many systems that keep traffic in control, let people know of emergencies, and generally keep things safe and flowing.

Humans have built all sorts of systems to manage pollution and keep it from harming us. Most people wouldn’t even know the systems were there if not pointed out. In the past hundred years, we have developed systems to share information wirelessly, making infrastructures all but invisible.

Look up in the sky. More and more, we are building up there, putting up satellites and space stations and continuing the quest away from our planet.

If the planet is not doing something for itself and humankind feels the need to work with the planet and make a little alteration, there’s a civil engineer involved in it.

So you may be thinking to yourself that civil engineers do everything. We do a whole bunch, but our projects usually tie into many other branches of engineering as well. A civil engineer may work out the signal timings for a traffic intersection, but it takes an electrical engineer to work out the circuitry. A civil engineer may design a tunnel, but it takes a mechanical engineer to make sure that healthy air pumps throughout. While a civil engineer may design a facility for treating sewage, chemical engineers design the treatment process. This is another one of the beautiful aspects of civil engineering—there are so many opportunities to work with other types of engineers. Depending on the project, you can learn so much about how things work just by working with so many others.

When I was a student, I was assigned to monitor reconstruction of a birdhouse in the Philadelphia Zoo. Although the project was considered a structural engineering effort, I was amazed watching the mechanical contractors install the piping system needed for a tropical environment into an artificial rock mountain. The civil engineering world can involve any other form of engineering, from nanotechnology to computers to mechanical to chemical.

Adding to the amazing diversity of civil engineering is the fact that every civil engineer can specialize in a part of a project. You can be a computer modeler, or a civil engineer that specializes in the initial planning phase of a project, or someone who inspects existing civil engineering creations to make sure they are working.

The rest of this book discusses the primary professions that civil engineers pursue, but it is far from a complete list. We will visit the worlds of civil engineers who: