Since the beginning of the construction of structures, engineer has been a key career. These professionals are indispensable when building anything from a bridge to a skyscraper to a tract home. And the amount of people seeking degrees in building engineering has been steadily growing over the millennia as building becomes more and more complicated and the profession has crept up to one of the highest paid around. There are many different types of engineers but only two attract the majority in the building trades. We will look at them here and discuss the differences in the two professions.
The Mechanical Engineer
Mechanical engineering is also a very popular engineering profession that many are gravitating toward. They do not work on building design issues, but mechanical engineering students like Haris Ahmed instead focus on learning how to produce specifications for, design, develop, manufacture and install new or modified mechanical components or systems. They would design many of the electrical and power units in a structure including elevators and power generators.
The Civil Engineer
The roots of civil engineering come from the earliest times of building shelters and other structures important to human life. They were particularly useful during war times when they were charged with using the things at the site of battles for weapons, shelter and defense. But they also play a big role in the design, construction of the physical and naturally built environment, including works like roads, bridges, canals, dams, and buildings. The civil engineer designs the foundations, creates the structural scheme, proportions structural members, and works with architects and others to ensure the soundness of a structure or system. A civil engineer typically works out of an office and is most used before a project commences, but some today are at larger construction projects daily because of the complexity of the project.
A long time ago, civil engineer back then had to help determine the feasibility of building the structure taking into account the place where it was to be built, the materials to be used, the size desired and the function of the structure. Since that time when there were rudimentary calculations made often resulting in structures that were not sound, there field has progressed to the point where we can build almost any type of building anywhere and the role of the civil engineer is diminished, giving way to other specialist engineers. Civil engineering is studied in universities worldwide as a bachelor degree course, and provides the foundation for a wide range of many specialized engineering disciplines including: transportation engineering, environmental engineering and structural engineering.
The Structural Engineer
Although it is most times characterized as an off-shoot of civil engineering, structural engineering has enough differences to make it a discipline all its own. These differences have been highlighted more by the modern advancement in architecture and science and of course technologies that aid in building and design. Primarily, structural engineering involves the analysis, design, construction and maintenance of structures that reinforce or counteract loads, in structure. They are very important figures on skyscrapers, dams, bridges and other large projects that either carry lots of people or things, or where there is a lot of pressure applied to its structure.