Bridge Engineering and Building Design

[rahuldby]

Just curious. Are there any structural engineers out there who are into both Bridge Engineering and Building Design?
Is it difficult to get expertise in both the fields at the same time.
I have heard from many of my fellow engineers that as a Structural Engineer you can either get into Bridges or Buildings but not both.
Any comments ???

 

[AggieYank]

Its my understanding you either go into the commercial world and design buildings, or you go work for your state DOT and if you're lucky, get into the bridge department to design bridges.

 

[rpeng]

royces, I have an acquaintance who specializes in residential and light comemercial design. He occasionally designs smaller bridges for residential developments.

 

[miecz]

I work for a consulting firm that has a building department, an environmental deparment and a transportation department. I design buildings, bridges and water/sewage tanks, but nothing large scale.

 

[JAE]

My own story:

When I first graduated many years ago - I first worked for a Civil/Structural Consulting firm that primarily focused on highway/civil projects with some exposure to buildings -I was a field inspector for numerous bridges.

After graduate school I worked for 9+ years in a Structural firm doing nothing but buildings (only an occasional "bridge" but nothing with DOT's).

Then switched jobs and began running a structural department that was responsible for both buildings and bridges. I hired some young engineers and trained them in both (I basically had to learn bridges myself).

This was a challenge as the bridge designs followed USA state DOT guidelines, standards, and AASHTO which all had to be kept up with. In addition, the UBC, BOCA, and SBC all had to be known and then came the IBC.

After about 6 years or so of doing both, we split our department up to better market and focus on the two specialties. We were successful in doing both, but it was a struggle to be able to market DOT's and stay up with their business and also to keep up with the now fast-changing world of building codes and specs.

It can be done. But not many firms do both.

 

[broekie]

I have been doing structural engineering for about 9 years now. At my first job, which was in Texas, I worked for a privately owned structural/civil engineering company that employed about 40 people. The structural portion of the firm worked mainly on building design, so that's what I did for my first three years.

However, my boss saw the booming transportation market in Texas and decided to get myself and 2 other of the engineers who had bridge experience from graduate school involved in starting a little bridge group. We were a minority owned business so everyone wanted us on our team. I did bridge design on a couple of $100 million interchanges in Texas. I did this for the next three years at that firm, before leaving Texas and moving up north.

I would say that my experience is somewhat rare, but I enjoyed having exposure to both. The other thing that it did was made the civil PE test a breeze. With exposure to both areas of structurall engineering, nothing that I saw in the afternoon portion of the test was new to me.

 

[rahuldby]

Thank you all for your comments and sharing your experiences. Good Luck!