Why Become a Civil Engineer?

Video Transcript

"My name is Jerry Elliot. I am a managing partner of an engineering firm in Eugene, Oregon, called Weber Elliot Engineers. I've been asked to address the question of why I became a civil engineer. My path to civil engineering is a lot different than most people. I came out of a college program with a really sound background in environmental sciences in the early '70s, and that was just as the environmental movement was beginning to gain steam. And I, like a lot of people in my generation, really wanted to save the environment or help our world. So I took my biological background and went on to graduate school, and found out that the firms that were getting environmental contracts were engineering firms. This is for lots of reasons, but basically I decided it was probably better to go in the front door as an engineer than the back door as someone else. So I went on and got a graduate degree in civil engineering, mostly water and wastewater processing engineering, which drew heavily on my environmental interests, and I ended up going into the civil engineering firm, civil engineering field, as a water and wastewater process designer. So my chief environmental work now is designing water and wastewater treatment plants to bring us purer water, whether it's water that goes back to the stream, or water that comes out of your tap. So that was my path to civil engineering. Others have different paths."