华盛顿州立大学

Civil engineering involves the planning, design, construction, and operation of facilities and systems that are essential to modern life and infrastructure. Civil engineers create and manage bridges, highways, buildings, airports, dams and waterways, water purification plants and distribution systems, foundations and tunnels, waste treatment and disposal facilities, and conventional and renewable energy supply systems.

In addition to on its Pullman campus, WSU offers a civil engineering degree at WSU Tri-Cities.

Strengths of the program

More than 30 civil engineering laboratories are available on the Pullman campus.
Pursue opportunities to conduct research with the best scholars and professionals in the country.
Learn fundamental engineering principles of environmental, geotechnical, hydraulics, structures, and transportation engineering.
Join other science, math, and engineering students in WSU Pullman's Stephenson residence hall—share classes with your neighbors, study together, get free tutoring, and use the hall’s computer lab.
Elective courses can be tailored for individual needs and interests.
WSU students score among the highest in the country on the national Fundamentals of Engineering exam, which is the first step toward professional licensing.

Requirements and core courses

As a civil engineering major at WSU, you can focus your degree with a senior-year study program built around one of the following:

Environmental Engineering: Provides a broad environmental background with emphasis in air and water quality, air pollution control, water and wastewater treatment, and hazardous waste management and remediation, including both natural and engineered systems.
Infrastructure engineering: A combination of transportation, geotechnical and materials engineering. Infrastructure engineering deals with understanding and improving the capacity of soil to support the weight of our nation’s infrastructure and the various human and material design aspects of transportation facilities, including traffic, geometrics, planning, pavements, and materials. Other examples of infrastructure engineering include preventing excessive settlement of new buildings or roadways, ensuring that tunnels retain their integrity, and maintaining the stability of earthen dams and embankments.
Structural Engineering: Focus on designing safe and economical structures for a changing society; improve aging infrastructure, increase the efficiency in utilization of construction materials.
Water resource engineering: Study the technologies and infrastructure systems that deliver water and ensure the availability and quality of a vital, but limited resource.

SAMPLE COURSES

A few of the engineering courses you could take at WSU:

Mechanics of Materials
Materials Lab
Construction Graphics
Dynamics
Innovation in Design
Fluid Mechanics
Technical Writing
Electric Circuits
Thermodynamics
Intro to Surveying
Structural Engineering
Transportation Engineering
Environmental Engineering

Careers in civil engineering

Perhaps more than any other field of engineering, a civil engineering degree offers the greatest variety of employment opportunity. Washington State University civil engineering graduates are in high demand by employers throughout the Northwest and the nation.

Traditional civil engineering employers include architectural and engineering firms. Other options include careers in government agencies, utility companies, telecommunications businesses, oil and natural resource industries, consulting firms, aerospace manufacturing companies, construction industries, biotechnology, and information technology firms.