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Preparing students for the real world through experiential learning is key to the ӣ����Ƶ educational philosophy.

“What we’re doing with engineering here at ӣ����Ƶ is very much a practical, hands-on experience,” says Associate Professor Adam Sevi, Ph.D. “Of course, we also deal with theoretical principles, physical principles, and so on, but really, our bread and butter is focusing on getting what I would call ‘boots on the ground’ engineers out the door following graduation.”

The David Crawford School of Engineering prides itself on being a “teaching school,” according to Sevi. “That might sound redundant, but if I were teaching at a research school, a fair amount of my effort would not be going into teaching,” he says. “Here at ӣ����Ƶ, we have our faculty teaching labs and grading or critiquing lab reports, not a graduate assistant; you will have a lot of faculty contact and mentorship here.”

Faculty guide students throughout their educational experience on The Hill and help students find the right civil engineering niche for each of them. Sevi separates this broad field into five categories: structural, environmental, transportation, construction, and geotechnical engineering, which is his specialty.

Professor Sevi Breaks It Down

“For a lot of people, they might drive across a bridge and see all this great steel and concrete; they might want to be a structural engineer,” says Sevi. “They go into the field and think about how the wind blows past a structure, earthquake loads, and live loads like cars and trucks on a bridge. Structural engineers think about all of this and work on putting together all that steel and concrete for the project.”

“Environmental engineering can be dealing with sites that are polluted, cleaning those sites up, and improving them so they’re usable for something like an industrial site. On top of that, you need your drinking water. Somebody has to pump that from its source and clean it up so people can drink it,” he says. 

“Environmental engineering is a major export out of our country. I have friends that deal with landfills and they have never done a job in North America – they are in South America, Asia, and all over the world. It’s a big industry and people don’t realize what a big export it is.”

Sevi sees the niche of transportation engineering as a “big-ticket item” in today’s world. “There are big-money projects in this field: large bridges, pipelines, airport improvements, water system improvements, and so on,” he says. “A city may decide they need a new bridge, but it is the engineer’s job to think about how this affects them 30 or 50 years down the line. They think about policy and projections into the future – should we be thinking like Chicago and put a bigger airport way out of town so the suburbs grow towards it, or should we expand our existing airport? This field is in high demand, partially because of a retiring workforce and the investment in infrastructure.”

“Construction engineering is the gorilla in the room, the thing that’s not intuitive to everybody,” says Sevi. “If you’re sitting in a million-dollar building on campus, something like 12% of that investment goes towards engineering, while the remaining 88% is construction. Here, we are really pushing a philosophy of engineering where you think about your construction throughout design, because if you can make the construction 10% more efficient, you essentially pay for your engineering component right then and there. We’re training people to think through the construction so they can build things that are catered to each specific project.”

“Geotechnical engineering – my specialty – ensures that things don’t turn into the Leaning Tower of Pisa. We are part geologist, we need to figure out what is down in the ground, so we don’t sink into it,” he says. “We have to be on site. When they’re drilling holes to figure out what’s under us, we’re involved. A fair amount of field work is still part of my career, and I like that part; you get out of the office, see what’s going on, and make assessments live on the ground. Similarly, we work in the lab where we test things. All of this is from entry-level junior engineers right up through the top.”

Graduating With a Professional Tool Belt

Sevi sees how the experiential learning that students go through at ӣ����Ƶ prepares them for the variety of specialties that civil engineering offers. “Engineering is definitely not the easiest way through a four-year degree. In fact, here at ӣ����Ƶ, it might be one of the harder ones,” he says. “But what you do get out of it four years later is a meal ticket – there’s a job. You don’t necessarily have to get a master’s degree because you’ll have a great breadth of experience on your resume already, alongside all the leadership experience and personal qualities picked up along the way during your time at ӣ����Ƶ.”

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