People often ask civil engineering professionals…”What is a civil engineer?” There is no short response to this question. And sometimes after you try to answer this question, you can leave the person who asked even more confused. There simply is no clear and concise answer.
Civil engineers seek to understand and design the physical, built environment that we can see all around us in the populated areas of our world. Consider the area that you live. Look around for the civil engineer’s design work. For example you might see streets, bridges, buildings, water and sewer utilities, stormwater, channels, dikes, dams, canals, etc. Civil engineering is a broad field, but within that broad field there are several specific sub-disciplines.
Generally there are the following civil engineering sub-disciplines: Materials Science, Coastal, Construction, Earthquake, Environmental, Geotechnical, Water Resources, Structural, Surveying, Transportation, Municipal and Urban, and Forensic Engineering. It is very possible that a civil engineer could specialize in more than one of these areas. But it is rare for a civil engineer to practice in all of these areas.
The following list is a break down of each area with a link to a short description:
Materials Science and Engineering
Coastal Engineering
Construction Engineering
Earthquake Engineering
Environmental Engineering
Geotechnical Engineering
Water Resources Engineering
Structural Engineering
Surveying
Transportation Engineering
Municipal or Urban Engineering
Forensic Engineering
To summarize, there are many sub-disciplines within the much broader field of civil engineering. Science such as chemistry, physics, dynamics and statics, as well as other basic engineering principles are applied in most all of these sub-disciplines, and so most civil engineers will study and prepare with a college level education (typically a minimum of 4 years), then pass an engineering test to become an engineer-in-training (EIT), and then after a certain number of years of working under a professional engineer (typically 2-4 years depending upon which jurisdiction), that engineer in training will take a professional engineer’s exam to be licensed as a professional civil engineer (PE). So what is a civil engineer? Good luck answering this question for yourself. But hopefully after reading this article, you have a better understanding.