What is it like to work as an engineer (environmental, civil, mechanical, not so much software/electrical)?

Is anyone here an engineer of the real-world kind? Like building devices, vehicles, roads, dams, etc., as opposed to circuits and software? Can you share a bit of what your day-to-day’s like, what kind of projects you typically work on (and how you work on them, like is it a lot of CAD and computer time, meetings with clients, sitting in front of a big table with blueprints…?)

Also have a specific question: What kind of maths do you tend to use, and how much of it? Is it mostly on the computer these days, or a lot of pen and paper still?

I’m really just asking for personal experiences and anecdotes :slight_smile:


For context, at ~ 40 years old, I’m thinking about going back to school to get a master’s in some sort of engineering – maybe “environmental engineering” (but the definition of that isn’t super clear to me). My BS was in environmental science, which only had the most basic of engineering principles (a teeny bit of fluids and electricity).

I’ve been a web developer for a while, surrounded by “software engineers”, but am looking to exit the industry altogether. It just wasn’t a good cultural fit for me.

Thankfully, though, because I primarily worked in renewables and solar, I’ve also been exposed to a few electrical engineers. It got me thinking about a lateral transition into engineering proper, vs software work. I don’t think EE is for me (too close to computer software & hardware and embedded devices)… I’m more interested in civil infrastructure, municipal power, etc. Granted, there’s a lot of electronics in everything these days, so I’m not looking to entirely avoid software and circuits… just not have them be the primary focus of my work.

I’m not really sure what the day-to-day of other engineers are like, though. Are there still people building, testing, improving things like bridges, dams, wind turbines, wave power, etc.?

I’m probably not smart/hard-working enough to be in academia doing the basic research behind those things, but I’d love to be able to help build them in the real world, if that’s even a realistic goal anymore. (Maybe it’s all coming out of China these days?) To the best my understanding, that is generally what the broad field of “engineering” does… but please correct me if I’m wrong!

I got a BS in Civil Engineering with an Environmental Engineering emphasis in the mid-ninety’s. The classes slanted to designing big projects were for designing water treatment plants, wastewater treatment plants, and landfills. Other classes were more like 'this is the environment and this is how you measure how it’s being affected."

My brother is a Civil Engineer. Now a partner at a firm he spent most of his career doing paperwork and site inspection for highway overpasses and the like. Often there’s a requirement for an engineer to witness a large concrete pour or inspect installation of modules. Others at the firm concentrated more on designing the highway overpasses and the like. They would spend a lot of time in-house with CAD systems.

I got a BS in civil engineering and currently work with a civil engineering consulting firm.

Civil engineering is a broad discipline that can cover everything from geotechnical engineering, to land development and site design, to transportation, utility infrastructure (water, electrical, gas, etc.), among other things. The firm I work for generally focuses on civil design for project sites, typically schools, public agencies, and utilities.

Most of my time is spent in the office, and is split between doing work in AutoCAD/Civil 3D, stormwater analysis software, or even MS Office if I’m writing reports, memos, or other documents. I usually attend several meetings each week to review project design or construction progress. For projects under construction, I typically visit the sites at least once a week to review construction progress and ensure compliance with the plans and specs. I’ll also make special trips to observe important tasks like asphalt and concrete paving, construction of stormwater infrastructure, and testing of subgrade performance before paving.

I frequently consult with my coworkers to get advice/opinions on design. I also frequently communicate with our clients and local jurisdictions (either at the city, county, or state level) for permitting purposes and engineering design submittals such as plans and stormwater reports.

The level of math I frequently use is at about the level of algebra and trigonometry. All the calculus and upper level math I learned in college has not been utilized since I started working, but it did help provide context and background for why things are the way they are. These courses are usually the foundation for upper level civil engineering courses like hydrology and structural analysis. Those courses help provide context for things like water pipe elements (thrust blocks, air release valves, cathodic protection, etc.).

I typically work 40-45 hours a week M-F, with the occasional 50-60 hour week if we’re up against a deadline.

Civil engineering in particular is widely utilized in site projects and is almost always subject to regulation and licensure. It’s typically expected that a fresh grad will obtain their EIT (engineer-in-training) certification as quickly as possible by passing the FE (fundamentals of engineering) exam. After that, many civil engineers go a step further and obtain professional licensure by passing their PE (principals of engineering) exam to become a Professional Engineer (also PE) in their state.

There can be a lot of variety among places that employ civil engineers. You can work for an agency like the city, county, or state, or a local utility. You can work for a civil engineering consulting firm like I do, or be employed with a broad spectrum consulting firm as the in-house civil engineer. Some firms can be literal one-person operations while others (Kiewit, AECOM, etc.) are nationwide or multinational.

Mech Eng. Today I used a calculator to convert kg to lbs. I had to add 16+20 as well as confirm that either are larger than 15.

I no longer do much math!

I’m in aircraft certification and airworthiness. I no longer draft drawings (CAD) though I review and comment/correct them. I confirm the intended parts/design/operation of whatever I’m reviewing is compliant with local and international regulatory standards, and review or author reports as needed to document this for approval (“certification”). I’ll travel as needed to inspect an aircraft in some cases. I work directly with our local authority to get their concensus on my compliance decisions especially when something is new or unusual.

There’s a lot of reading, research and consolidating guidance and knowledge to figure out what a specific design should be or comply to. I do need to understand the math behind some things, but more to confirm that a test done would show what it was intended to show. I wouldn’t be able to do most of the math I learned on school anymore, honestly.

I changed careers to get into this one. I looked into companies and jobs that seemed interesting and what education requirements there were, and used that to find work I thought I’d like and decide on going back to school. It was tough, but no regrets! Always new things to learn.

I will point out that many EEs work in the power generation and distribution field as well as in building design and construction. It’s not all circuits. Back in the day we would distinguish between electrical engineering (power distribution design) and electronics engineering (circuits). The major professional organization is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Your “municipal power” would be an example of electrical engineering.

Fire protection engineer, my second career (first was a firefighter).

My day to day work lands in two aspects of FPE, construction fire safety and fire protection system analysis and design. Construction fire safety consists of coming up with plans for general contractors to meet the fire code relative to construction safeguards and having a generally fire safe construction project. Some of the projects are straightforward (one I did today was for a coffee shop renovation in a strip mall), and some are extraordinarily complex (gut renovation of a 30-story, 100 year old office building), and everything in between. That also gets into figuring out how buildings can open before they’re 100% complete, which is a new big thing for developers.

The fire protection systems is also two-fold. I design sprinkler and fire alarm systems for new buildings and renovations. Our firm mostly does oddball, complicated systems that most engineering firms don’t want to do. New municipal water treatment plant, existing social club, fire pump replacements, etc. My specialty is in high hazard storage and flammable liquid storage/processing facilities. Converting a warehouse that stored empty soda cans into one that stores acetone in 5 gallon buckets? Have a foam system that needs to be converted to fluorine free foam? I’m your guy. A lot of the analyses can get very complicated; figuring out how to put them in a plain, understandable form is something I rather enjoy.

I don’t do a lot of CAD work. I’m not bad at AutoCAD, and can hack my way through Revit, but the kids we have on staff are very, very good. I will review the design needs and concepts with our younger staff, they’ll draw it, we’ll go back and forth a bit on the details, and I approve and stamp the drawings. I am a lot more involved in writing specifications and narratives. The installing contractor will develop “ship drawings” that I have to approve before construction can start.

Once construction is underway, I will inspect the installation and test it when it’s done before the city or town inspects it and “accepts” the system.

I interact a ton with local fire prevention/inspectors and building officials. I often feel more like a diplomat or negotiator than an engineer.

The extent of my math use today was filling out my expense report, and solving 3000 * 0.47 * 1.2 * 0.03 * 20 while in a Teams meeting to estimate how big a storage tank needs to be. The only calculus I have ever needed was to pass the FE exam. Fire protection engineers on the research side do more calculus, those of us in the field really don’t do much if any.

In my state, mechanical engineers can do fire protection and smoke control systems (but not fire alarms). Electrical engineers can do fire alarm, but not fire protection or smoke control systems. Fire protection engineers can do fire alarm, sprinkler, and smoke control systems.

Civil engineering is a fairly wide discipline. I work with some civil engineers, and they run the gamut between people who design and simulate pipe networks, to people who are basically project managers for large capital projects, to people who do hydrological modeling, to people who work on utility technology type stuff- GIS and the like.

In college (mid-90s) I interned for 3 summers at a civil engineering firm, and they mostly did suburban single family home development engineering- water, sewer, drainage, and roads. It was fun stuff, but by the second summer, I realized that the stuff they were doing right then was exactly the same as what they’d been doing three years prior, and even 15-20 years earlier, just with different titles on the plans and different technologies to do it. But it was still designing subdivision sewer pipes and water pipes, and making sure they wouldn’t flood.

That’s when I decided to go full-time into computer science; I felt like if nothing else, it wouldn’t be static. Which has been true, in spades. Almost too much so. I’m glad I got out of the technical side of IT and into the less technical side; that relentless technical rat race is too much.

I worked my way through high school and college working in a small civil engineering office back in the days before CAD and just as electronic distance measuring equipment was becoming a thing. Subdivision maps (in ink on starched linen for county record books), grading and drainage plans, sewer designs, some structural design, a few railroad sidings, and the like.

I got to spend a lot of time in the field and learned boundary and topographic surveying. Super fun, but hard work.

My degree was in architecture and we sometimes worked with architects on shopping centers, office developments, and custom homes so I got to work that side of the process too. The owner wanted me to get both engineering and architectural licenses and take over the firm, but he was an odd egg and when someone offered me a completely different kind of work overseas (in Saudi Arabia) I jumped on it. There I designed facilities for oil refineries and shipping terminals on a large scale.

My connections from Saudi Arabia led me to a couple of years in arctic Alaska, managing construction of oil wells, injection facilities and pipelines.

That’s one of the advantages of civil engineering, it’s a wide field.

I’d really become spoiled by the variety of work, always on the steep part of the learning curve, just where I liked it. When I returned to the lower 48 I went to work for a rapidly expanding department store chain, building stores mostly in malls, managing their consulting engineers, architects, store planning, and construction contractors. During that period desktop computers were replacing a lot of functions that had been running on corporate mainframes and I was fascinated by what they could do. So I drifted into computer programming and spent the next 15 years working for software and hardware companies, gleefully automating much of the grunt work I used to enjoy doing!

I ended up spending 8 really fun years managing various aspects of AutoCAD development at Autodesk before I ONCE AGAIN needed to try something new. So I got a Masters in education and became a middle- and high-school math teacher, by far the most challenging (and rewarding) vocation I’d undertaken yet. Retired a couple of years ago.

My son is an environmental engineer. He has a masters degree in environmental engineering.

He works for a small engineering consulting firm. He does things like designing water sewer systems, solar power fields, transportation projects, new subdivisions, landfills, etc. There’s a variety of things that fall under environmental engineering in the real world. He spends alot of time using his company’s CAD system. He also does various engineering/technical reports.

I have worked with four types of engineers in the last week, none of which was specifically computer/systems related.

A Civil Engineer came to inspect our septic system and general topography of our plot in preparation of us sinking a well.

A Mechanical Engineer is working on the design/scale of the HVAC system of our new town hall (I am on the board overseeing the project)

An Electrical Engineer is working on one of our company’s new distribution facilities. He’s a consultant that works with the utilities and municipalities on the requirements, where the various components will go, etc. Where we need power, how to get it there safely, reliability and aesthetically. The potential for rooftop solar. And a bunch of stuff around metering and controls for efficiency. There’s also a Chemical Engineer working on the bio-waste digester and power generator at the same facility.

Finally a Materials Engineer is working on reducing plastics in our product packaging and supply chain. I don’t know if that’s actually a degree or a sub-specialty of Chemical Engineering or Mechanical Engineering.

I’m sure there are a ton of structural engineers working on the structural aspects of both the town hall and the work facility, but I don’t deal with them. I think those would also be MechEs.

I worked for a year as a structural engineer for about a year plus some internships in the 90s before I changed careers. Even within structural engineering there are a wide range of firm types and jobs.

The company I worked for was a small mom & pop engineering firm that mostly worked on building things like apartment complexes, suburban office buildings, and other relatively small residential and commercial projects.

Most of my day to day activities consisted of stuff like:

  • drafting plans on paper and AutoCAD
  • checking some calcs for building loads
  • going onsite to construction projects to do stuff like monitor work crews or inspect things like bolts and fasteners or damage to structural memebers.
  • sometimes I would go out with one of the PE engineers to take measurements
  • run design software to model building frames, retaining walls, etc

Materials and metallurgical engineering is actually its own discipline; while it has obvious links to chemistry it is really more concerned with the characteristics and applications of solid state materials or coatings, and can generally be broken down in to the subcategories of metallurgy, ceramics, and polymers (and increasingly biomaterials, although that bridges into biomedical engineering and biophysics). Chemical engineering is actually more focused on chemical manufacturing process design and control than chemistry as a science. Mechanical engineering is a very broad discipline concerned with a wide array of machine and mechanism design/simulation; solid and fluid continuum mechanics; structural mechanics and dynamic analysis; aero/thermo dynamics, thermofluids, propulsion, and combustion science; tribology, lubrication, and corrosion; pneumatic and hydraulic system design and simulation; guidance & control engineering; heating, ventilation, and cooling (HVAC); and general manufacturing and process control.

Of course, having mastered the basic principles of engineering and physical sciences it is possible to work or move between adjacent fields albeit with a learning curve, and in fact coming out of school you really only have the most tenuous grasp of engineering applications anyway. Most of what you will do on a daily basis is learned on the job, and there is no class that teaches you about engineering chance processes, anomaly and defect investigations, analysis of real world structures, failure modes and effects analysis, or how to update the FlexLM license and reboot the server because the IT guy has too many other things to deal with.

For the o.p., as other posters have indicated there is wide variety of work from detail engineering and analysis using CADA systems and process control to overseeing construction work and navigating regulatory and bureaucratic requirements. In terms of maths, I think most engineers get by using little more than algebra unless you are deep into thermodynamics, propulsion science, controls, and structural or fluid analysis, and even then in application you will mostly be using turnkey tools and established methodologies unless you are pushing the cutting edge of engineering design or practice. You will need to learn the basics of math up through vector calculus and differential equations, and you should definitely learn basic statistics because it will likely be the most applied mathematics you will use, but it isn’t as if most engineers are ever solving integrals and partial differential equations by hand or proving new theorems as part of their job.

If you are interested in working in environmental or civil engineering you’ll likely need to get a Professional Engineering certification mentioned by @Tabco; otherwise, except for architectural engineering you probably don’t need to bother as there is no general requirement to have a PE license for the vast majority of engineering work. There are Fundamentals of Engineering prep books which can give you an idea of what you will need to know; you will probably need to study up or take courses in basic engineering (structures, rigid body dynamics, mechanics of materials, electric circuits, basic fluid mechanics and dynamics) to get those fundamentals but depending on your motivation and discipline for self-study there are MIT OpenCourseWare and other online courses that give structured lectures similar to what you’ll get in university classes, and Schuam’s Outlines for problems with solutions. What those lectures won’t give you are labs which are important for gaining a physical intuition of the applications but you can do some of that at home with minimal equipment if you are handy.

As for the concern about “everything coming out of China these days”, that is somewhat true for manufactured commercial products (but that may be changing as labor and shipping costs rise; the US is already shifting their focus for trading partners for many manufactured goods to Mexico) and it certainly isn’t the case for any kind of civil structures or environmental systems, nor is this an area where “AI” is likely to diminish the need for trained engineers (despite the claims of many prognosticators who know fuck-all about actual engineering practice and have no clue about how risky it is to place trust in an automated tool or system that can’t be validated or held to account for mistakes.). The United States (where I assume you are at) has a desperate need to upgrade and rebuild infrastructure and implement sustainable power generation systems, so if that is in your area of interest I think there will be a lot of opportunities assuming that the political will to do so endures.

You might consider going to a local ASCE or ASME chapter meeting and just talking to people to see what they do and their recommendations on how to proceed with education. You should also look for opportunities for internship or co-op; although you would certainly be older than most interns you’ll also come in with over a decade of real world work experience and (presumably) an ability to get up to speed faster than college hires who are often befuddled in the professional environment or are reluctant to engage and ask questions. I’ve had to spend so much time ‘socializing’ college grads and making expectations clear even when they are enthusiastic and industrious that having someone come in who knows what they want to do and how to ask for help would overshadow the higher salary expectations of someone in their forties. But you definitely want to make sure you have a good idea of what you want to do and can expound upon your expectations to explain the mid-career change.

Good luck to you in whatever you decide to do.

Stranger

Thank you! That was a great read, both for me and for my kid who is trying to chose an Engineering path in University and beyond.

Not sure about the rest of the country, but at least here in the state of Oregon, structural design drawings and approved shop drawings (I’ve been a steel detailer for over 30 years) require the stamp of a structural PE. That doesn’t mean that the people doing the actual grunt work have to have a PE, but it all has to be done under the auspices of one, and theirs is the ass that’s on the line if something goes sideways.

You’re welcome. The best advice I can give someone heading into college is to focus on developing the necessary mathematics and engineering fundamentals (as well as getting comfortable using computational tools like Matlab or Python/NumPy/SciPy to help do a lot of the calculation and visualization work), be open to different options because you may find after initially being interested in one area you actually have an enthusiasm for another, and take on challenges that are outside your elected area of interest. I wasn’t a big fan of chemistry but ended up taking a lot of it through O-chem and P-chem which has unexpectedly ended up serving me very well.

Taking an engineering economics or finance course is also useful because anything you engineer is almost certainly going to be a product that is sold or offered, and as you advance you get exposed to the business side of decisions that can influence what you would think are purely technical decisions; in particular, you often see financial types calling to cut corners on materials or testing because it will ‘save’ money, and understanding how they do those calculations and the assumptions behind them will (sometimes) allow you to push back against such ‘savings’ where they actually pose a greater cost in terms of liability.

Is this just for civil and building structures or any fabrication drawing? I’ve never worked in Oregon, but I’ve made hundreds of fabrication drawings of weldments, machined castings and forgings, and assemblies for construction equipment and aerospace hardware as well as performing structural analysis (both finite element models and by-hand analysis methods) which have never been stamped and signed by a PE. I actually wanted to get PE certification early in my career but because one of the requirements is to work under the supervision of a PE and nobody in the engineering departments I worked in had was a certification it just wasn’t possible.

To be honest, I think there should be some kind of certification process for anyone designing or (especially) performing analysis on any safety critical hardware because I’ve seen (and sometimes corrected) a lot of badly flawed designs and found incorrect analyses that overpredicted design margins, but because design standards and analysis methodology vary so widely between industries it would have to be a pretty expansive certification, or else divided into specialties for different types of structures, materials, and applications. For instance, while I’ve worked across a number of industries and different types of applications I don’t know the first thing about the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code and its extensive requirements that apply specifically to mostly static high temperature pressurized systems, nor would mastering that large amount of information be of much benefit to me in aerospace pressurized systems which have their own set of standards and very different applications.

Stranger

My career has been almost entirely in the building trades, everything from steel framing in residential structures (more and more common) to water treatment facilities (biggest I worked on was $3 million just for the supply and install of the metals) to USACE dams and fish ladders, that type of stuff. Everything within that scope requires the PE stamp, especially if it’s going to require special inspections.

We do a good bit of what are called “miscellaneous metals” - trash enclosure gates, things of that nature, that don’t necessarily require a PE, or special inspections. We design a lot of those in-house.

The one thing I think should be required before someone can get their PE or Architectural license is spending 6 months working in the shop, and 6 months working in the field. Just because someone can think of something on paper doesn’t mean it can happen in the real world. I spend a fair bit of time writing RFIs and getting engineers to change their designs to something that we can actually fabricate and/or erect.

I got to do a lot of surveying in my engineering intern days as well (I was the catch-all summer vacation backup crew member). I loved it, but like you say, it’s hard, sweaty work. And probably cold in the winter as well.

Beating the real world into the kids in my office who do my CAD is my every day. Please don’t tell the installer to put a 160-pound, 10-inch OS&Y valve 17 feet off of the floor. How are they supposed to install that thing?

My favorite is asking one of them if he had the MC Escher mode turned on when he drew whatever. Um, we’d need to add extra dimensions of time and space for that to work…

OMFG! That got a serious laugh out of me :rofl: