Schools Seek New Ways to Retain A Most Valuable Asset--Students
Civil engineering may not be the world's easiest college major and its graduates may not attain instant wealth or fame, but the thousands of students who now populate the nation's 227 CE schools and those who teach and mentor them share a commitment and enthusiasm that the statistics of ENR's first-ever survey of the discipline may not convey.
Melissa R. Ernst breezed through high school, but her first year as a CE major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was another story. "I found myself in the midst of a lot of turmoil," she says. "The calculus here is really, really difficult. It's very overwhelming your first year." Her freshman courses also included such "light stuff" as engineering statistics, mechanical engineering, AutoCAD and introductory geological engineering.