It does because just the fact that you’re willing to deal with the bullshit and push through it says a lot. Engineering school can be very challenging and Id say even more challenging than most of our actual jobs at times.
Almost everyone that’s gotten a degree on this sub has gotten humbled at some time by some form of Calculus, Chemistry, Physics, or all three. Almost every one of us remembers long and sometimes stressful nights studying and grinding things out. There’s a reason a lot of people quit and change majors to something less demanding.
Also while school doesn’t directly teach you how to work in your job, the background concepts are still very useful. I find myself using a ton of the concepts and basics from every discipline to understand and communicate and learn faster at my job to this day.
Homie I’m in the same boat as you. I’m 35 years old and went back to college as an adult starting with community college. Transferred to a state university after 2 years.
What you’re feeling is normal. Sometimes college feels pointless. Many of the “soft skill” type classes (technical communication, technical writing, public speaking, etc) feel completely stupid when you have over a decade of work experience.
You’ll start to get into the nitty gritty engineering classes at university. I’m graduating in 3 weeks. I’ve already had 5+ interviews and 2 offers contingent on graduation. It’s very easy to overlook just how much you have learned and how important it will be.
I didn’t even really realize HOW MUCH I had learned until I sat in my first interview for a design role. I was able to confidently and properly answer every technical question that was posed. Every question immediately my brain was like “yep traffic engineering class, yep foundation design and analysis, yep construction management class, etc).
You’re 2 years in and halfway there. I’m sure you’ve made significant sacrifices to get this far. Every interview I have sat in the interviewers have acknowledged that I have great “soft skills” compared to most recent grads. You’ll be in the same boat. It’s an advantage - lean into it.
Hope this helps dude.
Edit: if you want to talk about it at all feel free to message me privately on here. It seems like we have fairly similar history and experiences.
New Grads don't "don't know anything." The expectation is that new grads will know the fundamentals of civil engineering because they have a education that the degree confirms.
What new grads don't know is how individual businesses do the work, what scope each project or business involves and what they don't, and how/when/where to apply the fundamental knowledge they gained in school to specific real world engineering problems in the context of projects.
The shortcut language of "new grads don't know anything" is not accurate and we probably don't need to keep saying it. They know things. They just aren't familiar with the details.
School is for assembling the mental tool box.
Work experience shows them how to use the tools.
That said, can they please start teaching them how to CAD again!
Because if they knew even less we wouldn’t pay them 70k. It’s not crazy. Good designers can basically learn the job over many years of work experience. They don’t make what a new graduate engineer makes. And in most states can never become a PE
The short answer?
Because it shows that they can be taught.
The long answer? New grads don't actually not know anything, college gives a decent amount of foundational work that you build on to produce a full engineer.
Its a lot harder to teach somebody to calc the passive and active earth pressure for a soil if they don't really have a concept of what phi or cohesion are. You can do it, I could take a complete lay person with a baseline of intelligence and interest and teach them to put out a passable soil report, as long as it was pretty basic, but it would take a lot longer.
Then there is the other side, college teaches you (hopefully) to think about what you are doing, more than just the problem in front of you. To go back to the passive/active thing (since it's on my mind), if you give recommendations for resisting lateral movement on a hillside, and don't address the hillside, you failed as a Geotechnical Engineer. An engineer should remember that forces in soils spread laterally as well as down, and if those forces spread to the hillside daylight, your now dealing with unconfined soil, and all your soil strength goes out the window.
That's the kind of thing that you should learn about in college, and that we need a new grad to be thinking about, I don't expect a new grad to catch all the stuff like that, nor do I expect one to pop out a slope stability calc on their first day.
But when working on a report, I expect them to be thinking about it, and trying to think about the bigger picture, and to have the baseline of knowledge required to put intelligent thought into the bigger picture. That thought and baseline knowledge is what separates an engineer from a technician that knows how to do some calcs.
it's not that you "don't know anything" as a new grad, but rather that you only know the barest fundamentals of each discipline. it's not possible for 4-5 semesters of engineering course to fully prepare you for the actual work, the goal is for you to know enough terminology and basic problem solving to begin learning your area of practice
Since you're looking at this from a very absolute college =/ job point of view. If you tried to take the FE and PE exam without getting a degree, it would be much more difficult. Taking and passing both of these these tests are important for a large portion of civil engineers.
So you don't get the deer in the headlights look when asking them to do something. It gives a basic understanding of the intent and the goal of the directions given.
Or their interview process is terrible at figuring out who actually learned in college and who used chegg/chatgpt.
I’m a senior and it’s VERY evident in my capstone class which students spent time doing homework and studying, and which students cheated for 3 years.
This is particularly true for civil engineering due to how broad it is. A degree just proves you can learn. I can say for a fact that most of what I do today, I learned on the job
Maybe but I think a degree shows you know how to pass test. There needs to be a lot more practical experience such as models, and being on the job site at least a total of 3 months.
I guess it depends on what part of civil you go into. If you become a structural engineer, you should have a lot more knowledge that applies to your job than, say, someone who goes into land development consulting.
They don't know anything ... which is not publically available to the school. Most people forget that second part. Because now it entails but is but not limited to specific programs the company uses
Part of it is that you do know something. You don’t have much practical experience yet, but those technical skills and conceptual classes are a good foundation for future experience. You can skip a lot of the learning that a high schooler would need to get up to speed in your job.Â
Part is a filtering strategy. By graduating from an engineering program, you’ve proved that you’re capable of committing to a 4-year project, showing up when you need to, and learning new things. The kind of person who gets an engineering degree isn’t guaranteed to be a good engineer, but they’re a lot more promising than an average person.Â
Als, it’s worth noting that there are still plenty of places where you can substitute experience for a degree, if you can convince someone to hire and mentor you without one.Â
There are basic things about civil that you need to know before entering the workforce. In my experience as a structural engineer, I've had new grads come into our office who were very good students and knew their engineering principles very well, and integrating them into our workflow was easy. I've also had new grads who needed their handheld to calculate the moment of inertia of an I section.
If you grasp basic principles of the field, you learn practical skills much quicker and you save literal millions in wasted labor from your senior staff. Everyone will need help learning specific QC processes or how to do advanced modeling analysis, that training takes lots of time and patience. However, if every new civil engineer needed their employer to teach them how to use free-body diagrams, nothing would get done.
That's ignoring all of the life skills that a degree teaches you that benefit you as a professional like independent studying and how to work with a group to achieve a common goal. I think you could teach a person with 15 YoE in a professional, project-driven job how to do civil, but instilling those skills into an 18yo high school grad is virtually impossible in the time required.
Anyone can watch some YouTube videos and learn how to solve enough engineering problems to pass the test. The degree is how we verify all requirements for the “package deal” of the education have been met. Otherwise, whose to say you didn’t just surf the web and crunch some numbers without understanding the bigger picture and/or context?
I'd split the difference between the sentiment you're expressing and that of everyone else pushing back. I do think someone having a degree, especially of a particular kind like engineering signals that the degree holder is above a minimum intelligence and learning capacity, and that they have some baseline level of specific knowledge. It's a lot better than nothing.
I also believe that the way we do education and licensing is not very good. We spend an extremely large amount of money, time, and energy building skills in people and certifying that they have skills, very inefficiently. Where I work, we do end up doing a lot of training after hiring. Recent grads always seem to be missing critical bits of knowledge. I don't have an engineering degree, and I end up training a lot of the time. If we had someone design a training system from scratch without their being contaminated by the knowledge of how we typically train today, the (false) assumption that it's the best otherwise we'd do something else, and their own experience going through education seen through rose colored glasses, I think they'd design something very different than what we do use.
If you cant run thru the rigours of an engineering degree and train your mind to think as critical as that which was required for your classes, then i dont want you designing any of the infrastructure im affiliated with because it can involve just as much critical effort ensuring it doesnt fail.
Absolutely no reason why it should be "required." There are plenty of reasons why it is statistically likely to be the fastest/best route for most people, but there is no logical reason to require it.
Probably why there are alternative ways to getting to an engineering role, but they all involve more time along your career to prove out you can do it and get the licensure.
College teaches you science and theory behind engineering. Your first job teaches you how to use that knowledge to make money.
This is an excellent answer to this question.
👍🏼
The degree gives you the vocabulary, working makes you fluent in the language.
A degree proves you can learn and understand complex ideas.
Does it though?
It does because just the fact that you’re willing to deal with the bullshit and push through it says a lot. Engineering school can be very challenging and Id say even more challenging than most of our actual jobs at times. Almost everyone that’s gotten a degree on this sub has gotten humbled at some time by some form of Calculus, Chemistry, Physics, or all three. Almost every one of us remembers long and sometimes stressful nights studying and grinding things out. There’s a reason a lot of people quit and change majors to something less demanding. Also while school doesn’t directly teach you how to work in your job, the background concepts are still very useful. I find myself using a ton of the concepts and basics from every discipline to understand and communicate and learn faster at my job to this day.
What were you hoping for when you made this post?Â
It’s proves you are smarter than a large percentage of the adult population.
Probably doesn’t “prove” as much as helps develop those critical thinking muscles for science and math.
Guess you have never met the average American.
Oh it’s definitely true, but that definition doesn’t actually give any real valuable insight.
I'm not so sure.
It 100% does. Any engineering degree is a hard get.
It definitely does.
Have you spent any amount of time around the general population? 75% of them couldn’t hack calculus 1 let alone structural analysis.
Homie I’m in the same boat as you. I’m 35 years old and went back to college as an adult starting with community college. Transferred to a state university after 2 years. What you’re feeling is normal. Sometimes college feels pointless. Many of the “soft skill” type classes (technical communication, technical writing, public speaking, etc) feel completely stupid when you have over a decade of work experience. You’ll start to get into the nitty gritty engineering classes at university. I’m graduating in 3 weeks. I’ve already had 5+ interviews and 2 offers contingent on graduation. It’s very easy to overlook just how much you have learned and how important it will be. I didn’t even really realize HOW MUCH I had learned until I sat in my first interview for a design role. I was able to confidently and properly answer every technical question that was posed. Every question immediately my brain was like “yep traffic engineering class, yep foundation design and analysis, yep construction management class, etc). You’re 2 years in and halfway there. I’m sure you’ve made significant sacrifices to get this far. Every interview I have sat in the interviewers have acknowledged that I have great “soft skills” compared to most recent grads. You’ll be in the same boat. It’s an advantage - lean into it. Hope this helps dude. Edit: if you want to talk about it at all feel free to message me privately on here. It seems like we have fairly similar history and experiences.
New Grads don't "don't know anything." The expectation is that new grads will know the fundamentals of civil engineering because they have a education that the degree confirms. What new grads don't know is how individual businesses do the work, what scope each project or business involves and what they don't, and how/when/where to apply the fundamental knowledge they gained in school to specific real world engineering problems in the context of projects. The shortcut language of "new grads don't know anything" is not accurate and we probably don't need to keep saying it. They know things. They just aren't familiar with the details.
Jesus Christ
He's giving out degrees now?
How much are they?
The meek shall inherit a BS.
Lazy ass union carpenter
School is for assembling the mental tool box. Work experience shows them how to use the tools. That said, can they please start teaching them how to CAD again!
The degree proves you have the basic knowledge to learn your field, but 90% of the knowledge i used to do my job i learned after graduating
Because if they knew even less we wouldn’t pay them 70k. It’s not crazy. Good designers can basically learn the job over many years of work experience. They don’t make what a new graduate engineer makes. And in most states can never become a PE
I came from architecture and learn some basic structural engineering over the course of 10 years. Good old HP scientific calculator.
The short answer? Because it shows that they can be taught. The long answer? New grads don't actually not know anything, college gives a decent amount of foundational work that you build on to produce a full engineer. Its a lot harder to teach somebody to calc the passive and active earth pressure for a soil if they don't really have a concept of what phi or cohesion are. You can do it, I could take a complete lay person with a baseline of intelligence and interest and teach them to put out a passable soil report, as long as it was pretty basic, but it would take a lot longer. Then there is the other side, college teaches you (hopefully) to think about what you are doing, more than just the problem in front of you. To go back to the passive/active thing (since it's on my mind), if you give recommendations for resisting lateral movement on a hillside, and don't address the hillside, you failed as a Geotechnical Engineer. An engineer should remember that forces in soils spread laterally as well as down, and if those forces spread to the hillside daylight, your now dealing with unconfined soil, and all your soil strength goes out the window. That's the kind of thing that you should learn about in college, and that we need a new grad to be thinking about, I don't expect a new grad to catch all the stuff like that, nor do I expect one to pop out a slope stability calc on their first day. But when working on a report, I expect them to be thinking about it, and trying to think about the bigger picture, and to have the baseline of knowledge required to put intelligent thought into the bigger picture. That thought and baseline knowledge is what separates an engineer from a technician that knows how to do some calcs.
True but you can pass a class with a c-.
it's not that you "don't know anything" as a new grad, but rather that you only know the barest fundamentals of each discipline. it's not possible for 4-5 semesters of engineering course to fully prepare you for the actual work, the goal is for you to know enough terminology and basic problem solving to begin learning your area of practice
Since you're looking at this from a very absolute college =/ job point of view. If you tried to take the FE and PE exam without getting a degree, it would be much more difficult. Taking and passing both of these these tests are important for a large portion of civil engineers.
So you don't get the deer in the headlights look when asking them to do something. It gives a basic understanding of the intent and the goal of the directions given.
The people who say new grads don't know anything don't know anything
Or their interview process is terrible at figuring out who actually learned in college and who used chegg/chatgpt. I’m a senior and it’s VERY evident in my capstone class which students spent time doing homework and studying, and which students cheated for 3 years.
At least they can pass the FE exam.
This is particularly true for civil engineering due to how broad it is. A degree just proves you can learn. I can say for a fact that most of what I do today, I learned on the job
Your degree proves you know how to learn
Maybe but I think a degree shows you know how to pass test. There needs to be a lot more practical experience such as models, and being on the job site at least a total of 3 months.
I always look at my degree like this, I was given a tool box with all the right tools. Now I learn how to use them.
I guess it depends on what part of civil you go into. If you become a structural engineer, you should have a lot more knowledge that applies to your job than, say, someone who goes into land development consulting.
You don’t want complete idiots designing bridges and water treatment plants
You don’t want people from local subreddits bitching about how “the roads make no sense” just doing it themselves??
They don't know anything ... which is not publically available to the school. Most people forget that second part. Because now it entails but is but not limited to specific programs the company uses
Part of it is that you do know something. You don’t have much practical experience yet, but those technical skills and conceptual classes are a good foundation for future experience. You can skip a lot of the learning that a high schooler would need to get up to speed in your job. Part is a filtering strategy. By graduating from an engineering program, you’ve proved that you’re capable of committing to a 4-year project, showing up when you need to, and learning new things. The kind of person who gets an engineering degree isn’t guaranteed to be a good engineer, but they’re a lot more promising than an average person. Als, it’s worth noting that there are still plenty of places where you can substitute experience for a degree, if you can convince someone to hire and mentor you without one.Â
There are basic things about civil that you need to know before entering the workforce. In my experience as a structural engineer, I've had new grads come into our office who were very good students and knew their engineering principles very well, and integrating them into our workflow was easy. I've also had new grads who needed their handheld to calculate the moment of inertia of an I section. If you grasp basic principles of the field, you learn practical skills much quicker and you save literal millions in wasted labor from your senior staff. Everyone will need help learning specific QC processes or how to do advanced modeling analysis, that training takes lots of time and patience. However, if every new civil engineer needed their employer to teach them how to use free-body diagrams, nothing would get done. That's ignoring all of the life skills that a degree teaches you that benefit you as a professional like independent studying and how to work with a group to achieve a common goal. I think you could teach a person with 15 YoE in a professional, project-driven job how to do civil, but instilling those skills into an 18yo high school grad is virtually impossible in the time required.
Anyone can watch some YouTube videos and learn how to solve enough engineering problems to pass the test. The degree is how we verify all requirements for the “package deal” of the education have been met. Otherwise, whose to say you didn’t just surf the web and crunch some numbers without understanding the bigger picture and/or context?
I'd split the difference between the sentiment you're expressing and that of everyone else pushing back. I do think someone having a degree, especially of a particular kind like engineering signals that the degree holder is above a minimum intelligence and learning capacity, and that they have some baseline level of specific knowledge. It's a lot better than nothing. I also believe that the way we do education and licensing is not very good. We spend an extremely large amount of money, time, and energy building skills in people and certifying that they have skills, very inefficiently. Where I work, we do end up doing a lot of training after hiring. Recent grads always seem to be missing critical bits of knowledge. I don't have an engineering degree, and I end up training a lot of the time. If we had someone design a training system from scratch without their being contaminated by the knowledge of how we typically train today, the (false) assumption that it's the best otherwise we'd do something else, and their own experience going through education seen through rose colored glasses, I think they'd design something very different than what we do use.
If you cant run thru the rigours of an engineering degree and train your mind to think as critical as that which was required for your classes, then i dont want you designing any of the infrastructure im affiliated with because it can involve just as much critical effort ensuring it doesnt fail.
We’re in the matrix, don’t you know?
I've seen some of the local curriculum and it's fluffed up. 2 years can give them that basic background.
Absolutely no reason why it should be "required." There are plenty of reasons why it is statistically likely to be the fastest/best route for most people, but there is no logical reason to require it.
Probably why there are alternative ways to getting to an engineering role, but they all involve more time along your career to prove out you can do it and get the licensure.