Why study civil engineering?

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What is civil engineering?

The profession of civil engineering is all about the design, construction, and maintenance of our built environment. It frequently includes large scale public works, like bridges, roads, pipelines, airports, dams, building structures, walls, and railways. It’s an extremely important field which shapes the way we live, especially in large urban areas, and it is a field which continues to evolve with new technologies and environmental understanding. Civil engineers fulfil a number of roles as designers, on-site investigators, project managers, data analysts, risk assessors, surveyors and much more.

Reasons to study civil engineering

1. The skills you’ll learn

Civil engineers can take on many roles within a project and need to build a wide set of skills to match. You’ll learn to survey, and assess project feasibility, including site visits, environmental assessments and budget estimates.

You’ll use computer aided design to visualise creative solutions to engineering problem solving situations, and you’ll use complex calculations combined with knowledge of materials science and construction methods to build a strategy for project delivery. Civil engineers must also manage their timelines, so you’ll develop skills to ensure that budgets and lead times are adhered to, while liaising with clients and contractors to make sure that communications are swift and effective.

It’s a highly skilled profession, and once you’ve settled into your professional work, you’ll realise how adaptable these skills can be to other aspects of your life.

2. The career you could have

There’s a very wide field of job types within civil engineering, and you could find yourself working on projects at wildly different scales, from a local town bridge up to an international sports stadium, airport, or entire city plan. As your career progresses, there will be opportunities to specialise and you might end up wanting to go deeper into any of the following areas of engineering: transportation, construction, geotechnical, management, environmental, structural, nuclear, coastal, traffic, architectural or computational.

The possibilities are nearly endless, and with so many large construction projects happening around the world, the opportunities to travel are many and varied.

If you're not sure what you want to do after you graduate, give our Career Matcher a try today.

3. All the topics that get covered

In your undergraduate degree, you’ll cover the fundamentals of civil engineering. Later on, when you study a master's degree or gain professional accreditation, you’ll have options to explore many of these areas more fully and branch out into new and emerging fields within the profession.

Some of the civil engineering fundamental topics are hydraulics, materials science, geotechnics, design, mathematics and physics, structures, computer aided design, sustainability, civil engineering practice, computing, water engineering, resource management, and enterprise tools.

4. You can study all over the UK

Fortunately, you have a large selection of courses all over the country to choose from. The top three ranked civil engineering courses in the UK according to Complete University Guide can be found at:

And the best options for student satisfaction ratings are at:

Check out the full civil engineering league table from Complete University Guide.

5. It’s something you enjoy!

If you like to build things, fix things, and find out how everything works, then civil engineering is something to seriously consider as a career path. You’ll learn a widely applicable set of skills at undergraduate level, and progressing in the profession will allow you to literally build bigger and better projects, collaborating with many different types of clients and offering excellent opportunities for travel.

Does civil engineering sound like firm career foundation? Start searching for courses now!