Civil engineering is the study of how mathematical and scientific knowledge, experience, and theory is practically, economically, and efficiently applied in the use of material and natural resources to design and supervise the building of structures and facilities.

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Scholarships for Civil Engineering Students

Posted by Longcivile On 5:17 AM 0 Comments

Graduate without the Debt and Work in an Exciting Career

Civil Engineers are the folks who build, design and maintain the major structures we see around us everyday. Students who pursue a degree in Civil Engineering will learn about all the major structural systems that keep our world running smoothly. Graduates may find themselves working for local or national government or in construction and industry.
Auburn University: Leading Civil Engineering Program

Auburn University’s College of Engineering offers a number of Civil Engineering scholarships available for incoming freshmen and returning students majoring in Civil Engineering. Amount varies and selection criteria is based on GPA, academic achievement, community service and extracurricular activities. The selection criteria for incoming freshmen is also based on SAT/ACT scores. Qualified applicants must have intentions to pursue Civil Engineering and be able to provide a career resume to date:

* William H Baskerville Endowed Engineering Scholarship
* Ray D Bass Endowment for Civil Engineering
* William A Boone Endowment for Civil Engineering

The following three scholarships, also from Auburn, have additional criteria attached:

* Jesse D. McGill Memorial Scholarship– In addition to the above criteria, this scholarship will be awarded to a student pursuing a Civil Engineering career in the Highway Industry.
* Alan P. Hudgins Endowment for Civil Engineering Scholarships awards Civil Engineering scholarships with preference given to students from Monroe County, AL.
* John Steele Henley II Endowment Scholarship– Applicants must be juniors or seniors with a 3.2 GPA. Preference will be given to applicants from Alabama or the Commonwealth of Virginia.

American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)

The Y.C. Yang Civil Engineering Scholarship awards two annual scholarships of approximately $2,000 to an ASCE student member in good standing who is currently enrolled at an ABET-accredited college or university as a junior or senior majoring in Civil Engineering with career plans in structural engineering. This award is partially based on financial need, but other selection criteria apply such as academic achievement, leadership and applicant’s personal statement which should explain in 500 -1000 words why applicant is deserving of award, applicant’s interest in structural engineering and career plans. Applicant must submit a one page resume and 2 letters of recommendation from faculty members.

Eugene C Figg, Jr. Civil Engineering Scholarship is also awarded from the American Society of Civil Engineers. This $3,000 scholarship is awarded to a student member of the ASCE in good standing who is currently enrolled as a junior or senior in an ABET accredited college or university and majoring in Civil Engineering. Applicant must be a United States citizen and planning for an engineering career with an emphasis on bridges. Selection criteria include financial need, academic achievement, leadership, and future career plans. Applicant must submit two 500 -1000 word statements, one of which is to discuss the applicant’s passion and interest in bridges and the other is to discuss why the applicant should receive this award. In addition to scholarship application, applicant must submit 2 letters of recommendation, official transcript and a resume.
Society of Women Engineers (SWE)

Women have traditionally been seriously underrepresented in the engineering field. In the 1950s the Society of Women Engineers was born to provide the fraternal camaraderie needed to encourage women to pursue the field. The SWE has gained recognition and strength in numbers. It also offers women some very generous monetary support:

* Chevron Scholarship offers a $2,000 scholarship to a female sophomore or junior member of SWE in good standing. Applicants must be majoring in Civil Engineering at an ABET accredited college/university. Applicant must be a US citizen with GPA of at least 3.0. Eight scholarships are awarded.
* Elizabeth McLean Memorial Scholarship awards $1,000 to a female sophomore member of SWE in good standing who is majoring in Civil Engineering at an ABET accredited college/university. Applicant must be a US citizen with GPA of at least 3.0. One scholarship is awarded.

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How to Start a Construction Company?

Posted by Longcivile On 5:06 AM 1 Comments

Starting a construction company can be a profitable venture under the right circumstances. Construction is an industry that will always be in demand and will not yield easily to automation. If you have experience in construction and want to start your own company, be sure to research requirements, laws, and business basics before taking the plunge.

One of the first things to consider before starting your own construction company is financing. If you do not have available funds to purchase materials, tools, and labor, you will need to arrange financing for the start up of your company. You also need to make sure you have a contractor’s license and bonding insurance to protect you.

The amount of financing you need will vary greatly depending on the size of the construction projects you intend to start out with. If you are performing small jobs such as remodels, additions, or decks, you might be able to purchase materials and tools on credit. Remember that interest eats away at profit, so be sure that you can meet a completion date and collect your fees from your clients in a timely manner.

It is extremely important to have an understanding of cost estimation when you bid a project. Underbidding yourself to get jobs will soon eat away at your profits and eventually doom your success. However, if you bid too high, your more established competitors will beat you out. If you do not know how to bid competitively, you should either develop the skill or hire someone who is knowledgeable about construction estimation.

With funds available for purchasing materials, insurance to cover potential accidents, and clients, you will have to turn your attention to your craft force. If you plan to be on site at all times overseeing the construction process, you can easily manage your craft force. If you intend to work hands off, you’ll need to hire someone experienced at leading a crew of workers to make sure the job is done right and according to schedule.

Start with small jobs and advertise by word of mouth. Do a good job for your initial clients, and they will spread the word. Ask to place temporary signs at a completed site for advertising purposes as well. Make sure you have someone available to provide estimates for potential clients without holding up current construction projects. As your company grows, you can hire additional personnel to assist with certain jobs.

Be sure to develop a good relationship with building inspectors in your area and to have both a business attorney and an accountant at your disposal should you need their services. Careful planning and attention to detail will ensure that your construction company stays afloat during the roughest first two years of operation. With a qualified craft force and a desire to succeed, you can grow a solid small to mid-sized construction company within five years.

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100 Project Manager Interview Questions

Posted by Longcivile On 5:02 AM 0 Comments

The below questions are for hire a Project Manager. This can also be used for evaluating already hired project managers.

1. How do you handle non-productive team members?
2. How do you motivate team members who are burned out, or bored?
3. How do you handle team members who come to you with their personal problems?
4. What are your career goals? How do you see this job affecting your goals?
5. Explain how you operate interdepartmentally.
6. Tell me how you would react to a situation where there was more than one way to accomplish the same task, and there were very strong feelings by others on each position.
7. Consider that you are in a diverse environment, out of your comfort zone. How would you rate your situational leadership style?
8. Give me an example of your leadership involvement where teamwork played an important role.
9. Tell me about a situation where your loyalty was challenged. What did you do? Why?
10. In what types of situations is it best to abandon loyalty to your manager?
11. In today’s business environment, when is loyalty to your manager particularly important?

12. Why are you interested in this position?
13. Describe what you think it would be like to do this job every day.
14. What do you believe qualifies you for this position?
15. What have you learned from your failures?
16. Of your previous jobs, which one did you enjoy the most? What did you like the most/least? Why? What was your major accomplishment? What was your biggest frustration?
17. Tell me about special projects or training you have had that would be relevant to this job.
18. What are some things that you would not like your job to include?
19. What are your current work plans? Why are you thinking about leaving your present job?
20. Describe an ideal job for you.
21. What would you do if you found out that a contractor was in a conflict of interest situation?
22. If I were to contact your former employee, what would he say about your decision-making abilities?
23. Give me an example of a win-win situation you have negotiated.
24. Tell me about your verbal and written communication ability. How well do you represent yourself to others? What makes you think so?
25. Give me an example of a stressful situation you have been in. How well did you handle it? If you had to do it over again, would you do it differently? How do you deal with stress, pressure, and unreasonable demands?
26. Tell me about a tough decision you had to make?
27. Describe what you did at your work place yesterday.
28. How would you solve the following technical problem? (Describe a typical scenario that could occur in the new position.)
29. What strengths did you bring to your last position?
30. Describe how those contributions impacted results?
31. What are the necessary steps to successful project management?
32. How do you plan for a project?
33. What is important to consider when planning a (your type of project)?
34. What are things that you have found to be low priority when planning for (your type of project)?
35. What distinguishes a project from routine operations?
36. What are the three constraints on a project?
37. What are the five control components of a project?
38. What qualifications are required to be an effective project manager?
39. What experience have you had in project management?
40. Name five signs that indicate your project may fail.
41. Tell us about a project in which you participated and your role in that project.
42. When you are assigned a project, what steps do you take to complete the project?
43. As you begin your assignment as a project manager, you quickly realise that the corporate sponsor for the project no longer supports the project. What will you do?
44. Your three month project is about to exceed the projected budget after the first month. What steps will you take to address the potential cost overrun?
45. Tell us about a successful project in which you participated and how you contributed to the success of that project.
46. You are given the assignment of project manager and the team members have already been identified. To increase the effectiveness of your project team, what steps will you take?
47. You have been assigned as the project manager for a team comprised of new employees just out of college and “entry-level” consulting staff. What steps can you take to insure that the project is completed against a very tight time deadline?
48. What is a “project milestone”?
49. What is “project float”?
50. Your project is beginning to exceed budget and to fall behind schedule due to almost daily user change orders and increasing conflicts in user requirements. How will you address the user issues?
51. You’ve encountered a delay on an early phase of your project. What actions can you take to counter the delay? Which actions will have the most effect on the result?
52. Describe what you did in a difficult project environment to get the job done on time and on budget.
53. What actions are required for successful executive sponsorship of a project?
54. How did you get your last project?
55. What were your specific responsibilities?
56. What did you like about the project and dislike about the project?
57. What did you learn from the project?
58. Tell me about a time when you ran into any difficult situations. How did you handle them?
59. Tell me about the types of interaction you had with other employees.
60. Tell me of an accomplishment you are particularly proud of and what it entailed.
61. Do you have people from your past consulting services who would provide a professional reference?
62. What other similar consulting or independent contractor services have you rendered?
63. Discuss how you would envision working as an independent contractor or consultant for us.
64. What conflicting responsibilities will you have?
65. What would be your specific goals for this new role as a consultant or independent contractor?
66. What experience do you have that you think will be helpful?
67. This assignment will require a lot of [describe]. Will that be a problem for you?
68. This assignment will require interacting with [describe the types of people]. What experience do you have working with such people?
69. What would you like to get from this new assignment?
70. What are two common but major obstacles for a project like this? What would you do in the face of these obstacles to keep your team on schedule?
71. What is project charter? What are the elements in a project charter?
72. Which document will you refere for future decisions?
73. How will you define scope?
74. What is the output of scope definition process?
75. What is quality management?
76. Do you inspect or plan for quality ?
77. What is EVM? how will you use it in managing projects?
78. What is a project? and what is program?
79. What are project selection methods?
80. Which tool would you use to define, manage and control projects?
81. What is risk management and how will you plan risk response?
82. What are outputs of project closure?
83. What are the methods used for project estimation?
84. What methods have you used for estimation?
85. How would you start a project?
86. If you were to deliver a project to a customer, and timely delivery depended upon a sub-supplier, how would you manage the supplier? What contractual agreements would you put in place?
87. In this field (the field you are interviewing for), what are three critically important things you must do well as a project manager in order for the project to succeed?
88. What metrics would you expect to use to determine the on-going success of your project?
89. How are your soft skills? Can you “sell” the project to a team?
90. You have a team member who is not meeting his commitments, what do you do?
91. Companies have historically looked at technical skills, but more and more business managers are realizing that not have “people” skills tend to cripple projects.
92. How many projects you handled in the past? Deadlines met? On time/ within budget? Obstacles you had to overcome?
93. Do you understand milestones, interdependencies? Resource allocation?
94. Do you know what Project Software the new company uses and is there training for it?
95. Tell me about yourself. (To avoid rambling or becoming flustered, plan your answer.)
96. What are your strengths? (Make an exhaustive list and review it exhaustively before the interview.)
97. What are your weaknesses? (What you say here can and will be used against you!)
98. How would your current (or last) boss describe you?
99. What were your boss’s responsibilities? (Interviewers sometimes ask this question to prevent you from having the chance to claim that you did your boss’s job. Be ready for it!)
100. What’s your opinion of them? (Never criticize your past or present boss in an interview. It just makes you look bad!)

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Project Management Careers

Posted by Longcivile On 4:55 AM 0 Comments
Project management is an art entailing planning, organizing, and administering set goals. It requires the orchestration of the various aspects of deadline-based discrete projects.

The Profession

A profession in project management requires working with a team of people; therefore, a successful project manager needs to understand the importance of teamwork, and how to achieve more together. Usually, a project is temporary in nature and requires a one-time effort, in order to create a distinct product or service. This demands various technical skills that can be handled efficiently by a project manager.

Encountering and overcoming challenges is a part of this profession. The basic requirement is to ensure the delivery of a project within defined time limits. The optimized allotment and combination of various inputs to meet the objective of the project is another challenge in this profession. Project managers generally work in various areas, such as computer and information systems management, engineering and management of finance. Initially, they help in the development of the range of the project, and then monitor its progress all the way. Ultimately, they gain vast experience in their field and become consultants, partners or shareholders in project management companies.



Activities Related To Project Management

Project management deals with various kinds of activities that need to be carried out effectively in order to accomplish the work within client specifications. Some of the related activities are as follows:

-Planning regarding the set objectives
-Analyzing and designing of the objectives
-Evaluating risk factors involved.
-Estimation of resources
-Allocating resources
-Organization of work
-Acquiring material and human resources
-Task distribution
-Directing activities
-Controlling execution of the project
-Tracking and reporting about the progress of the project
-Defining products of different projects
-Predicting future trends in the project

Skills Required

Efficiency has become key in almost every profession, and cost overruns and delaying of deadlines are not tolerated. Therefore, the requirement for project managers has increased rapidly. They lead and guide the team to coordinate complex projects, and accomplish their targets on time, as well as within the budget. Hence, they need certain skills:

-Motivation
-Excellent communication skills
-Leadership quality
-Diplomacy
-Awareness
-Analytical skills
-Decision making ability
-Managerial skills
-Being methodical

that help them excel in their field of work.

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Affordable Online Engineering Degrees

Posted by Longcivile On 4:48 AM 0 Comments
Today civil engineers may earn on average about $50,000 per year. Therefore, it is worth while obtaining suitable qualifications which will give you recognition within your chosen speciality. But there are so many civil engineering courses on offer, it is difficult to know where to start. Here are some pointers to help you embark on an online degree course which you will not end up regretting.

An online engineering degree is an affordable way to earn your degree in mechanical, chemical, electrical, computer, biomedical or civil engineering. The average cost of a campus based bachelors degree can be $80,000. The same four year online degree may only cost $20,000. The average salary for an entry level engineer is $40,000. That means you get a return on your investment in the first year of employment with the online degree, and it will take you 2 years to recoup your expenses from a campus-based program!

The demand for engineers is continuing to increase and the future looks bright for future employment. Fifty percent of engineers earn between 58 and 93 thousand dollars. You can easily see that an investment of $20,000 is a good deal.

An online engineering degree program will allow you to have access to materials, lectures, assignments and resources 24/7. You will have access to fellow students through e-mail, blogs, streaming threads, or even VOIP technology. You can work on your own schedule around your other obligations. You will not have to give up your full time job to complete your degree. This means you may also be able to tap into a tuition reimbursement program through your employer to decrease the cost even more!

Programs for bachelors, masters and phD degrees are available from accredited schools across the nation. Geography does not have to be a barrier to obtaining your degree. An online college program website can provide you with the information you need about curriculum, accreditation, financial aid, classes, and technology. You will be able to compare programs to get the best value and most affordable accounting degree.

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AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010 - Whats New

Posted by Longcivile On 6:47 PM 1 Comments
Take a look at what is new with this presentation from Terry Bennett, Senior Industry Manger for Civil and Construction at Autodesk.



Is this a big release or what!!


Lots more to come

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What do you think of civil engineering?