What do civil engineers do at their jobs?
There are a lot of specialties in civil engineering. Some of the include soils engineering, petrochemical engineering, and my dad’s specialty, structural engineering. Structural engineers are the ones who actually design the insides of buildings so that they can be built. An architect decides what the outside and inside spaces will look like, but a structural engineer is the one who makes it all possible by making sure the guts of the building can keep it upright. Later in his career he got into cost estimating, which is a subspecialty of structural engineering. He estimated the costs for projects, taking into account how much they were going to need to spend for concrete, steel, etc…and making sure that the projects came in either on or under the budgeted amount. He said that was actually a lot more fun than designing what amounts to the skeleton of a building. Some of them do, in fact, sit in a cubicle from 9-5, but a lot of civil engineers are out in the field. For instance, a pet
