What is Civil Engineering?
Civil engineering is arguably the oldest engineering discipline. It deals with the built environment and can be dated to the first time someone placed a roof over his or her head or laid a tree trunk across a river to make it easier to get across. The built environment encompasses much of what defines modern civilization. Buildings and bridges are often the first constructions that come to mind, as they are the most conspicuous creations of structural engineering, one of civil engineering’s major sub-disciplines. Roads, railroads, subway systems, and airports are designed by transportation engineers, another category of civil engineering. And then there are the less visible creations of civil engineers. Every time you open a water faucet, you expect water to come out, without thinking that civil engineers made it possible. New York City has one of the world’s most impressive water supply systems, receiving billions of gallons of high-quality water from the Catskills over one hundred mi
Civil Engineering is considered to be the oldest engineering field. Civil Engineering includes the planning, design, construction, maintenance, and operation of the infrastructure that surrounds us and is the underpinning of our society. Our infrastructure includes roads, airports, railroads, buildings, bridges, water and wastewater treatment plants, sewers, drainage, flood control, water supply, landfills, and many other facilities. Most everything civil engineers do affects our daily lives in many ways. When you get up in the morning and take a shower and brush your teeth, the water comes from a water treatment plant through a network of pipes, designed by civil engineers. The dirty water leaves your house through a sewer and ends up at a wastewater treatment plant designed by civil engineers where it is treated and released to a nearby stream or river. When you go to school or work, the roads you drive on and bridges you might cross were designed by civil engineers. The inlet drains
