Career Focus:

Civil Engineering is a diverse branch of engineering, encompassing environmental, geotechnical, structural, transportation, and water resources engineering. Civil engineering professionals are involved with the planning, analysis, design, construction, and management of bridges, buildings, dams, heavy industrial plants, airports, highways, railways, tunnels, embankments, sanitary disposal facilities, and many other facilities and systems. Environmental engineers employ physical, chemical, and biological processes to reduce pollutants in and provide clean resources from water, air, and ground. The physical infrastructure of modern civilization is conceived and realized by civil and environmental engineers.

Due to their scope and importance, much of this physical infrastructure is public. More than one quarter of civil engineering professionals are employed in the public sector and much of the civil engineering infrastructure is publicly owned or funded. Civil engineering is centrally concerned with public works and is directly associated with public policy and public financing.” This considered, civil engineers should be particularly interested in obtaining PE licensure.

Moreover, “The civil engineering profession recognizes this grave importance to society, as evidenced by the first Fundamental Canon of the Code of Ethics of the American Society of Civil Engineers: “Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public and shall strive to comply with the principles of sustainable development in the performance of their professional duties.”

Source: Roddis, W. M. Kim, Ph.D., P.E.. “Civil & Environmental Engineering: Letter from the Chair”. 2010.

7 September 2010.

<http://www.cee.seas.gwu.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id>.

Francisco J. Alvarez

civil & environmental engineering ‘14

■ First Year Schedule ■ Professional Résumé ■

■ Sample of writing within discipline ■

■ Nuts & Bolts: A Review of My First Semester with SEAS ■

■ Dr. Baoxia Mi (interim faculty advisor) ■

College application supplement essay

Read “Vision of an Aspiring Ekistician”

Why civil engineering?

 
As a young citizen very interested in learning how healthy communities are established, among the issues that concern me most is the need for adopting sustainable patterns of development for human activity, particularly in my native state of Florida.

From water supply and wastewater management to provision of infrastructure for transportation of an increased population, it goes without saying that there are growing challenges for designing and maintaining societal infrastructure, while properly accounting for the complex interactions between artificial and natural environments. Fortunately, engineers are problem-solvers and innovators who can turn ideas into viable solutions and their work is ultimately constructive service to the greater society. Even so, the need for engineers who can emerge as leaders to rise to these challenges with conscientious solutions; can adequately identify emerging issues in their respective fields; can cooperate with policy experts and public officials; and can continue from where the previous generation of engineers left off, is great. However, I want to join their ranks.

– yours truly, December 2010

Notably, I have long been interested in ekistics, a field exploring past, present, and prospective patterns of human settlement, especially in relation to geography and ecological implications. In application, ekisticians strive to establish sustainable (and thereby perhaps promoting prosperous) interactions between the inhabitants of a settlement and their physical (as well as increasingly socioeconomic) environments. A field requiring an interdisciplinary perspective, I deem ekistics a field that lends to a satisfying service-centered career that also would enable me to fulfill my mission of stewardship in a very practical manner.

Notably, ekistics does not comprise a specific college major. I have decided to approach this field primarily through civil and environmental engineering, which comprise the basis for ekistics. Additionally, I plan to fulfill social studies coursework requirements in the four-year plan for civil engineer majors with courses in economics and political science.

Let’s just hope I can balance all that as well as requirements for graduation from the University Honors program!

– yours truly, December 2010

I am excited by the prospect of pursuing a career pertaining to a collection of disciplines committed to constructive (in more than one sense of the word) service to others guided by high ethical standards. Read my Case Studies in Engineering Ethics.

– yours truly, December 2010

■ Curriculum for Prospective Civil Engineers – Environmental Concentration (latest edition) ■