selection of graduate courses 3

[Lion06]

I am starting a MS program this fall. I have to take (10) classes. I am listing the ones that I intend to take and some others that I might take or am curious about. I would appreciate input from others as to what classes you found most useful in a MS program or suggestions from the "maybe" list.
Definitely taking:
Advanced Concrete
Advanced Steel
Wood and Masonry Design
Connections
Structural dynamics
Advanced Mechanics of Materials


Considering:
Finite element analysis
fracture mechanics
Advanced Structural Mechanics
Advanced Structural Analysis
Intro Finite Element Analysis
Elasticity & Stress Analysis
Advanced foundations
forensics
pre-stressed concrete

 

[NashBridges]

I think its important to know where you want to go with structural engineering. Do you plan to design bridges? If so, I'd strongly recommend a prestressed concrete course. Also, where do you plan on practicing? If you are planning to practice in an area of moderate to high seismicity then I'd strongly recommend structural dynamics (Chopra text) and even geotechnical earthquake engineering (Kramer text). Independent of these considerations, I'd also recommend advanced foundations because exposure to deep foundations is important to structural engineers (even if the course is taught from a geotechnical perspective.) Unless you plan on getting your PhD, a thesis isn't going to be worth the time.

 

[Lion06]

I have no intention of working on bridges.
Structural Dynamics is a required course for the degree.
I was actually dropping the advanced foundations from my list because I have since learned that it is less about foundation design and more about along the geotechnical aspects of deep foundations.
Thanks for the input!

 

[271828]

What's in the Adv. Mech. of Matls class?

As COEngineer typed, some of those topics might be worthless to a structural engineer. I was very disappointed in their version of "curved beams." The thick walled torsion stuff was worthless to us also.

Hopefully the class will have a lot of thin walled torsion, shear center, etc. That's required knowledge for anybody who wants to call himself a steel expert--being able to understand where all the AISC and AISI equations come from. That's not easy stuff, so is hard to learn on the job.

For a typical designer just wanting to design buildings, that entire class could be skipped. It depends on your career goal.