I’m a recent grand and have a job offer for a civil engineering position with a firm that mostly does defense work. The position deal with geotechnical concepts, but I’d be the only one in the department with civil engineering training i.e. no P.E.s. There are professional engineers in other departments. The work would deal with excavations, tunneling, numerical modeling, and that’s about as specific as they could get until I get security clearance.
Would doing this prevent me from getting my PE? Do I need direct supervision of a professional engineer, or would one around the office count? Do you think this would be a detriment in future job searches for a traditional civil engineering position?
It depends on your state. Some states require that you work under the direct supervision of a licensed P.E., and some states count any so-called “qualified experience” whether or not it was under the supervision of a P.E.
I’d be a bit concerned that you would be the only engineer in your department. This might make it difficult to pick up the practical experience necessary to succeed as P.E.
Presuming that you have passed the F.E. exam (or will shortly), you will be working as an Engineer-in-Training (EIT). This is basically analogous to an apprenticeship. It is very difficult to work as an apprentice engineer when your supervisor is not an engineer.
I would think that the agency hiring you would want a more experienced geotechnical engineer, but perhaps they are simply looking to hire a new graduate to work on pretty basic stuff.
I’d want to find out more information about the job. However, worst case, you work at it for a few years and move on if you don’t think that it’s benefiting your career. With the economy in the state it’s in currently, though, I don’t think I dismiss any job offer out of hand.
Have you just completed your BS or your MS? I hate to say it, but without your MS, you probably just wouldn’t be able to do geotech engineering without supervision. Undergraduate work, because it has to cover structural, transportation, environmental, and geotechnical subjects, just doesn’t get in-depth enough to work in the field.
If the other PEs are civil/geotech and you will work *very *closely with them, it might be OK depending on your state. If your work has to be stamped to go out, one of them will be supervising your work.
I worked for less than a year at a place that was trying to transition into engineering (water resources) work. There was one PE in the place, and he was civil with a background in environmental remediation. I couldn’t do anything. He was, quite appropriately, not willing to stamp anything outside of his area of practice and I couldn’t do anything in mine without that supervision. My entire time there was pretty much doing cost estimates. It sucked.
I agree with everything robby said. State P.E. requirements vary widely. I believe most have limitations on what kind of experience you can claim when applying for your P.E.
It pays to check out the P.E. requirements early anyway. When I was moving from IL to MA, I found out that the MA P.E. application required applicants to submit calculations from each employment counted as qualifying experience. If I hadn’t copied some of my calcs from my job in IL before leaving, I wouldn’t have been able to count it as experience.
Well, looks like I’d need a PE as a reference, but pretty much anybody to verify my experience. I don’t think there is much cross department integration, but if there is, I’d probably be able to get that reference.
The lack of other engineers around does bother me, or else I’d take this job in a second. Fortunately, I do have two other offers and an interview on Monday (After 11 months of searching. When it rains it pours.), so if I know I want to work in civil projects, I’ll have that chance.
I was going to recommend that you take the job because it’s hard out there right now for the industry; however, with two other job offers, I would really think twice about it. There are no words to explain how frustrating it is to not work under a PE. You won’t be able to work on anything that has a real design component to it. Cost estimates are fun for a while, but they do get old. A ME shouldn’t be serving as a reference on your design work, as I understand it, but I may be wrong.
There is also the fact that experience really does count for a lot in the field. When you are doing soil borings and run into something strange, who are you going to call for advice? Do you know that practical limits of the friction angles of the local soils that you will be dealing with? What kind of compaction effort will you get from different kinds of equipment?
You aren’t really taught these things in school. You learn by experience or by listening to your elders. You don’t want to learn by experience; it’s expensive and there is a good chance that you messed something up.
Apparently there are a dozen or so civil PEs in other departments that I could turn to with questions. I just wouldn’t be working with them regularly.
I do have an interview Monday, and they said they’ll be able to let me know right away. That job is such that if they make me an offer, this is all moot. If not, then there’s a tough decision ahead.
Agree with the discussion above, but there is one other option: finding another P.E. in the area who specializes in your field to “mentor” you. I know, easier said than done!