Civil Engineering emerged as a separate discipline in the 18th century, when the first professional societies and schools of engineering were founded. Civil engineers of the 19th century built structures of all kinds, designed water supply and sanitation systems, laid out railroad and highway networks, and planned cities.
Civil Engineering skills are strongly rooted in mathematics and science, and a high level of proficiency in these subjects is required to predict the performance and capability of the structures they create. For this reason, students with strong backgrounds in physics and mathematics who are also interested in designing functional structures, from bridges to hydropower systems, are prime candidates to study Civil Engineering.
Civil Engineering is the application of physical and scientific principles for the design, development, and maintenance of both the constructed and the naturally built environment. This includes infrastructure such as airports, bridges, buildings, canals, dams, pipelines, power plants, railways, roads, sewage systems, and more.
Civil Engineering projects can come through the public sector, from government agencies, or through the private sector, and can be either large or small in scale, with civil engineers working in fields such as planning, budgeting, project and asset management, research, analysis, and more.
Civil Engineering is the second-oldest engineering discipline, after military engineering, having been created to differentiate civilian from military engineering. As a result, civil engineering is a broad discipline that is broken down into several sub-disciplines.
The broad nature and long history of civil engineering mean that its growth as a discipline is closely associated with the development of human knowledge in areas including physics, mathematics, structures and construction, geography, geology, hydrology, environmental and materials sciences, mechanics, and more.
Scientific principles, such as those developed by the ancient Greek Archimedes of Syracuse, were applied as they were understood, helping to drive engineering forward, which continues to this day with innovations and research.
Quite simply, modern society would not exist without civil engineers. For example, civil engineers were necessary to build every part of our transportation infrastructure, from roads and bridges to docks, train stations, and airports. The development of our utilities, such as water, electricity, and phone and internet service, similarly required professional civil engineering knowledge. All that is before we even get into the use of civil engineering for huge public structures like dams, power plants, water treatment plants, and highways.
we rely on civil engineers when we need to get water on hot summer days (by building reservoirs and pipelines). We also need them to design and build protective structures like levees and traffic barriers. In addition, every major construction project needs a civil engineer to account for the various things that may cause danger in the future, including natural disasters.
Moreover, civil engineering is a broad field, and its impacts are felt outside of just engineering. People in diverse fields are reliant on the expertise of their civil engineer counterparts. For instance, as part of their profession.
Civil engineers are among the most important engineers in our society. Essentially every aspect of life, from going to the store to taking a shower, depends on a construction project that could not have happened without a civil engineer. If you want to do creative work that helps the public, then you may want to put “becoming a structural engineer” at the top of your career list.
