Live Virtual Tour: Civil and Environmental Engineering

Hello, I'm here. I just had to pop off a different panel.

Oh no worries. I was just making sure. Hello everyone will kind of wait a few more minutes for everyone to kind of cycle in. I know it's been a long day with a bunch of different panels and webinars.

So I will go ahead and wait a few more seconds.

Alright, got a couple people. This is great also just a front load and if you have any questions at all during this Tour those kind of a smaller group. Since this is mainly focused on civil and by the way this is the civil session, so if you're in the wrong place now you know but a little bit smaller and environmental, sorry Oh my gosh someone environmental yes so if you have questions that this is very like personalized and we want to answer your questions and we want to pause where you want to pause and we want to elaborate where you want us to elaborate.

So please use the chat or if we say something that like makes no sense or we use an acronym and you're like, what the heck is that? Please call us out, put it in the chat like I wish that I could see your faces and see your reaction, but I can't so use the chat as much as you can and will try and get some polls in there as well to gauge where you're at and what you want to hear about so.

Give it like one more minute.

Alright.

302 you feel good about getting started, Katie.

Yes, I can go ahead and give my introduction. My name is Katie Rodriguez. My pronouns are she, her and hers. I'm currently in my fourth out of four and a half years studying environmental engineering. I also have a minor in International Development, originally from Bakersfield, CA. I don't know if I said that already, but I'm hoping to make the full time transition out here to Colorado so other things that I'm involved in.

Including.

I've studied abroad, short-term and long-term. I currently working an internship which is also tide with my senior design project with Sammy and I will talk a little bit about that later. Give you more context to what lab senior design looks like and I like to play Intermural Sports as often as possible. If you have any questions about any of that, any of that, we'd be happy to get into that later.

Sweet and my name is Sammy. I'm in my 4th and final year studying civil engineering will be graduating in May and I'm from Centennial Co. Let's see my pronouns. Are she her hers? I love civil. I have declared it and stuck with it this whole time, which I'm very impressed with myself about 'cause there are. Definitely some classes where.

That you like more than others, but ultimately I've really, really enjoyed this major and I think it can take you so many places. I've had a couple internships. The first one was dealing with a lot with construction and construction management, and the second one dealt a little bit with transportation planning as well as water resources. It was like a rotation, so I got to see both of them an on campus. I'm involved in the society, women engineers which I love as well as a campus ministry. I'm doing the senior design project with Katie and hopefully it still finding time to sleep in half on as well. So if you have questions about any of those things.

Katie mentioned that I mentioned please, please please throw them in the group chat and Katie before we kick it off. I want to ask kind of both of us a question to frame why we're here, but why did you choose environmental engineering?

Yes, so I have been. I know that I am one of the lucky few who have known that I wanted to do engineering for quite awhile. However, I wasn't sure what path I wanted to take within engineering. It started like about a 2014. I know it seems like such a long time ago I was in Haiti helping an orphanage building retaining wall after the earthquake and I came home and got sick with a stomach parasite called Kryptos radium.

And I was sick for about 8 weeks and my dad is also civil engineer and he drew up plans for a water purification system that match that was specific to their water system that they had at the orphanage and he went back and installed it. And I thought this is so amazing I could get paid to do something like this. It's such an important topic. We will talk about it in depth later. There is water quality and water resources, so that's kind of how I got on the path of Environmental Engineering an. From there I will be.

Choosing to focus the rest of my career in water resources.

Wow, I love your story. Have a really cool story in a very personal reason of why you chose environmental, which is really awesome. I chose civil 'cause at first I thought it looked cool which is kinda lame reason. But it's true. An originally I was really thinking I wanted to architectural engineering 'cause I just thought it sounded fancy and so I applied to a bunch of schools that offered architectural which really limited my number of schools that I applied to. 'cause it's not that common to program and I applied CSU which does not have architectural.

And I got here and I loved it, so much that I was like still was close enough. So then I went into it and I'm so glad I did because it's so much broader and now, even though I originally started being interested in architectural and structural now as I've taken more classes. I've really gotten more interested in the environmental side in the water resources side hydraulics, and Hydrology and seeing like how civil and environmental ties together in ways that I didn't know that they would so I've really, really loved it and I just love the idea. The main reason I picked it just to give like a short little quip is.

I love the idea of creating such like small scale, large scale, impactful infrastructure that's really under appreciated but really makes life like functional like I drove on a Rd today and I turned on the faucet today and wow, there is clean water and like I ate food today that needed water to grow the crops that produce that food and I'm in a building right now so all these things in your life can be attributed to civil and environmental engineers. And it's really cool to be to like have steak in that community so.

I hope that got all of you excited. That makes me excited. As you can probably tell, but you're here for a campus tour, so we'll talk more about the facilities on campus and sprinkle in some cool little environmental and civil engineering tidbits but.

Welcome to campus csus. Great, we really wish you could be here in person. It's such a different feeling when you get to be so if you have a chance to come up here and just walk around, I would highly encourage it, but this is kind of the central hub of campus so this view right here is really awesome. 'cause I just remember biking back to my residence Hall after going to class all day and I can see the mountains. There's the foothills and then further beyond is like Rocky Mount National Park. Amazing views and it's very outdoorsy. Very green, very lush and you can see people biking. It's very bike friendly as well.

I actually love our campus. A couple more aerial views that one in the top left. Very green. There's lots of intermural space. You often see people out there playing Frisbee or playing volleyball and you see skateboarders, bikers, there's our brand new lagoon, the Little Blue Pond that you see is really great to just set up a hammock and read and relax and then on the right photo is our stadium, which is pretty recent. It was completed the summer before Katie and I started at CSU four years ago or in 20.

Follow 2017 so it's brand new. It's really fun. It's great to go to football games. Our team isn't the best team in the world, but we don't Care 'cause it's really fun to. Just share 'em on anyway and be there for all the hype and super fun. But we care about engineering at the rest of campus is beautiful, but this tour is specifically focused on our two engineering buildings, starting with Scott bio.

OK, to your unmute I think.

Thank you so this is our Scott Bio Engineering Building as we call it for short. It was named after Walter Scott Junior, who donated 53 point $3,000,000 to our College of engineering. Therefore he gets a building named after him. It's only fitting so primarily in here is our engineering success center. We have a lot of classrooms and lab spaces. This is primarily where chemical, biological engineering and biomedical engineering have their Upper Division Labs.

There is also a water quality teaching lab which we will get into later for environmental engineers. Civil engineers can also take that as a technical elective, I believe, but this is primarily focused on chemical and biological and biomedical engineering.

And then, like I mentioned, the engineering success center is front and center one of the first things you'll see inside this building. It is a great office to get to know. You will definitely be visiting there in your undergraduate career. There are so many different resources there for you like Academic Advisors, Scholarship Advisors, we host things like mock interviews and resume reviews to help you get prepared for the career fair. The staff who puts on our semester each semester of the career fair with hundreds of employers who come to campus.

Or this year was virtual, which was interesting, but actually went very well. We have so many different resources there for you to help you increase your professionalism and really work on those soft skills that are required for an engineer. I know that it's kind of a stereo type of Engineers that we don't like to talk to people. Or maybe we just want to be by ourselves with our computers, and that's definitely not the case.

As an engineer, it is very important to know how to communicate with people that have those Scott soft skills and this is a great office to learn how to do that and get those resources available to help you. Additionally, this is where all of our diversity engineering clubs and organizations are. So for example, like Sammy mentioned, we have suite which is the Society of women engineers. I've been involved with ship which is the Society of his band Professional engineers and we have quite a few others.

The National Society of black engineers of stem out in stem, and I think there's a couple more that I'm missing as well. So like I said this if you need anything at all, this is always the 1st place you want to start is an engineering success center.

Mute Sammy

Oh my gosh, we're not doing too well today. Are we OK? As I was saying this is another great study space in Scott bio engineering and sorry to break it to you. But if you go to study civil and or similar environmental engineering or any sort of engineering discipline or anything at all, you're going to have to study in college. It's not all funding games, but when you love what you're studying, it makes it that much more interesting and form. So these are our design studios in Scott bio. So the great thing about these is there set up.

In the same way that Lockheed Martin sets up their space because they are like accredited to these study spaces and how that is is there's one table in the middle where you can collaborate and meet together and have group discussions and then outside it kind of concentric to that middle table is individual computers and your individual workspace, where you can log on, do your part of the project and then come back in the middle and meet again and collaborate. So these face really fast really fosters that collaborative nature.

And it's also really nice because these computers have everything you could possibly need for any of your engineering classes. So if you need to use AutoCAD to create like a site layout, or if you need to use Matlab to code some sort of complex math problem or Excel, Microsoft like anything Microsoft is on there, anything you'll ever need for your classes on there, so no need to purchase any of those things on your personal computer. We have a VPN for the College of engineering, so if you need to access all that software and you're not on campus, or you're not able to get to Scott bio.

You can also access that VPN from your personal computer and pull up AutoCAD or Microsoft or Matlab or whatever it is on your own computer an access all the files that you've saved to your University drive, which is really, really convenient and I love it. Another nice thing about engineering, we're so special we get our own Career Center that Katie just talked about. We also get our own like we have three different spaces where you can print things, whereas some majors at CSU have to like venture across campus to go to the one place where they can print.

So here you can print in Scott bio. You have a printing credit that is way more than you'll ever need. I have like so much money left to print things so I could print like.

Dozens of novels and still have plenty left, and that's really nice if you need to print out notes for your class or whatever you need, you can also print in the engineering residential learning community as well as the other engineering building which we'll talk about in a bit.

Here's another great study space in Scott bio. I like this one because you can oversee what's happening in the atrium so often times I'm in Scott bio at like 11:00 PM at night, trying to crank out a final assignment and I see some of my friends coming in looking all disheveled and tired, like oh like I gotta finish this project. And I waved to them and they come up the stairs and they join me and it's really great that we have white boards on either side of this table. Actually, I think just one side. Don't write on the other side. Will get in trouble for that, but it's really nice to work through problems.

And go through examples, especially before a big test and to work with others in that space. I absolutely love it.

So I sent out a little poll for y'all to answer so that is safe. Drinking water is one of the things that we focus heavily on in the environmental engineering program. Our water quality, treatment resources, everything related to water is super heavy. An environmental engineering here. That's one of our main focus areas in research, so I'll give you a couple more minutes to answer that poll before I give you the answer.

So this is our water quality teaching lab. Like I said, it is in the Scott Bio Engineering Building so it is away from the majority of the other engineering classes that you'll take in the other engineering building which we will see momentarily. One of the things that I love about this class is it's really where you learn that engineering isn't black and white. There could be 5 different ways to treat water quality, so we will take samples from the lagoon and the Puter River, which is the River that runs right through Fort Collins are.

Lab has direct access to the Puter River, so it's really convenient way to get water samples and ensure that their quality didn't deteriorate or nothing happened and they weren't contaminated in transportation. Once you collect those samples, so great way to test water quality and like I said, Engineering is not black and white. You and your partner could have completely different ideas and ways of treating the water to get it back to water. Drinking drinking water quality, and you could both be right.

And that's exactly what we do. Is engineers. We are constantly innovating and creating new designs and patents for ways of making life easier. That's again how new designs are created. If someone thinks of something, a better way to do something. So what percentage of people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water systems? It is actually 30%.

So I'm currently in a class called International Development and water engineering and we are learning how to design water and sanitation systems for communities in underdeveloped countries and so that I thought it was just a really prominent statistic and one of the reasons why it pushes us to be innovative and explore new technologies so that everyone can have access to safe drinking water and.

Sanitation systems.

Cool, so we're briefly going to mention chemical and biological engineering, so chemical and biological engineering is a dual degree. We were one of the first universities to get a vet accredited dual degrees, so you do get chemical and biological engineering in four years. And the reason I wanted to highlight that is because it is closely related with environmental engineering, so some of the more prominent avenues of chemical and biological engineering of course, are related to things like Pharmaceuticals, however.

A lesser known Ave for that is air pollution. As a chemical and biological engineering student, you are diving deep into organic chemistry and microbiology which yes us. Environmental engineers have to take organic chemistry and microbiology. However, it's just the first course. We don't feel much past that, but as chemical and biological engineers they are truly understanding all the nitty gritty details of every chemical in the atmosphere and how that can either be eradicated or improved.

And how that would mix with other chemicals in the atmosphere so water in air pollution is definitely something that they deal with. And if you're interested in that and you love chemistry and biology, an all those tiny details, then that might be a good major to also look into.

Great thousand awesome overview of the Scott Bio Engineering building, but we have a whole other Engineering Building on campus that's a little bit older and the way that I like to frame these two buildings is the Scott Bio Engineering Building. Like Katie mentioned, it has a lot of the newer engineering majors like chemical and biological and biomedical engineering, and a lot of the labs in like include samples and having to have like perfectly sparkling clean beakers and having to make sure that you have like.

No, no everything is sparkly and new and beautiful and clean, whereas the engineering building the little bit older focuses on majors like mechanical engineering and civil engineering where you are getting down and dirty and working with concrete and working with materials and sparking things. An crushing things and I think that's where I find a little bit of my happiness is working with things where I get my hands dirty. So this is our engineering building. Can't tell you how old is it is much older than the Scott Bio Engineering Building and it really goes back to the roots of.

CSU back when CSU was Colorado A&M, That's actually where Cam Cam the ram. His name comes from. So this is a really, really well established field at CSU which is really neat.

Here we go.

OK, so this is our thermal fluids lab. This is allowed that all civil and environmental engineering students take in their third year. I believe that's when we took it, man, it's been awhile, so this was one of the hardest yet. My most favorite lab. This is the lab where I truly felt like. OK, I can be an engineer. I feel like I actually know things now and know how to apply them into the field. So I'll just give an example. Some of the machines that you're seeing here that yellow one.

Can be used for petroleum engineering. You can test the pressure an velocity. Everything along that pipeline there that blue one kind of in the corner is a wind tunnel. We have a huge version of that out at our CSU powerhouse, which is a great research facility just North of campus. Another fun fact is that I don't remember which decade it was, but Jack Cermak, he was the one who created the building codes for skyscrapers to withstand.

Strong windstorms he actually tested the Twin Towers here on campus before they were constructed, so lots of great innovation happening on our campus. So one of the things I love about the fluids lab is like I said, it was hard. However, you really feel like you can be an engineer after this. So one of the things that I think is really unique about CSU is we participate in something called Order of the engineer and upon graduation you taken of.

Saying I will always be an ethical engineer. I will always double check my calculations. I won't take any shortcuts because about 100 years ago in Canada some engineers were building a bridge across the River and their design failed and it claimed over 100 workers lives just because they didn't double check their calculations. So while you might think you are amazing at calculus, you still need to double check your calculations every single time and so one of our former fellow ambassadors, he actually clogged one of these machines that we were using in lab.

And it was spewing water all the way up to the second floor, and the professor kind of took it as a learning opportunity, as they like to say. And he wasn't mad. He said, you know, these things happen, but CSU really understands that it is important to make these mistakes in lab while we have power in a controlled space before we are professional engineers and making these mistakes in the real world where our designs have effects on people's lives.

I'm sure you've heard Jackie say it an it was said in the welcome this morning is that yes, we do want to change the world. An civil and environmental engineering students do have impacts on people's lives every single day. Just as Sammy gave you the five examples of how she's already seen. Civil and environmental engineering in her life today.

Alright, next we're going to move into one of my favorite labs and I just put a pole in the group chat so this is smash lab. It's really called civil engineering materials lab, but really the whole the whole idea of the lab is you get to break things and in the lab first day class we broke a soda can and throughout the semester we didn't crush a bowling ball or steal any like sweet old ladies fine China to break, but we did get to test a lot of commonly used civil engineering materials and test the limits of them so.

As some of you are probably very aware, civil engineers love to use concrete everywhere. It's a good material, it's cheap and strong, gets the job done. So that was our main emphasis in this class. There is a three credit hour lecture portion of this where you learn about the different materials you learn about how concrete works, and you learn about like the difference between cement and concrete, which I didn't know for the longest time. Fun facts that I kind of like to say about that. I don't. I think it's fun. Other people think it's kind of lame, but you can go tell your parents you learn something today.

And saying that cement and concrete are the same thing. Is like saying that eggs in cake are the same thing. Concrete is the final product, the cake or a cement is the binding agent that.

Brings everything together like all the other components in concrete, which might be like rocks or pebbles or sand, or different admixtures that change the the properties of the concrete. So making concrete kind of like making a cake. And we did get to make concrete in this lab. I wish we had some more pictures of it, but a cool thing about this is you learn how to test concrete, how to mix it, how to cast it so we have the opportunity to become ACI certified in this class and ACI stands for the American Concrete Institute.

State representatives from ACI come out and teach you how to do all these respective tests on like what concrete and how to make sure that it's mix properly. How to make sure it's the right density, and then ultimately, as you're testing, you get to create your own concrete beam and then once that Beam is castan cured, you can bring it into the smash lab and put it in a huge compression compressor and see how much compressive force it can take before it crumbles. And it's really satisfying to see something just like.

Fall apart and it's really really fun. This lab is right below one of our common study spaces. Sometimes people that are studying up in the Internet cafe, which is what we'll talk about a little bit later. They hear like a snap or a crush or something. Break was that and they look over the side and they're like, Oh, it's just the Civil Engineers in their smash lab, so it's really fun. We also get to work with other materials. The other two most common ones are steel and wood, so in this particular picture they're doing attention tests on steel.

And one thing that you'll learn as civil engineer is that concrete is really great in compression, so that's why we use it for a lot of beams, but not so much for sorry. We use it a lot for columns, but not so much for horizontal beams. So if we were to use concrete for a beam, we would reinforce it with steel, because steel has a lot of compressive string and it allows the concrete to Bend a little bit more and be more duck tile before it fails. So these make a really fun ping noise when they break in half an. It's really satisfying to test the different types of steel and to see something.

Kind of create like an hour glass sort of shape as it gets pulled apart. The last thing that we test a lot is wood, so there's lots of different types. There's a natural wood that has the little like eyelets and fractures, kind of along in the grains. I guess there's also engineered wood which is kind of a combination of a bunch of different types. That is a lot stronger and it's interesting to put it in a bending test and see it just Ben Ben Ben Ben until it snaps and it's makes again a really satisfying noise.

And this all goes back to the order of the engineer that Katie talked about, where we want to test the limits of materials here so that we're not pushing the limits of materials in the real world, 'cause I'm sure all of you have heard of engineering disasters where a bridge fails or building is subject to like.

Earthquake loads with that are too much, and so it crumbles and all these things, so it's really important to consider at the different limits that these materials can endure, and factoring that into your analysis as you're selecting materials to use in your project. Plus, it's really fun to break things, and it's very satisfying.

I see that people want to crush bowling balls and find China.

Maybe maybe you can use a user bat up to this point, but at CSU bring your bowling ball and ask if you can put it in there. I've never asked so you never know.

Alright, next we have talk about office hours and advising.

Awesome so office hours and advising academic advising are super important to get you through your engineering career smoothly. So office hours are something that I was scared to utilized at first. All of your professors are required to have a certain amount of office hours where they're just sitting in their office or this case this semester on zoom and they are available to you that entire time. I found that advisors or.

Professors are always available and willing if you email them. If that doesn't workout for your schedule, I love going to office hours, especially as I'm getting into my upper.

Classes in my degree. They are all things I'm super interested in, so I didn't always visit office hours in the beginning because I was like, Oh no, it'll be fine like I'll get through it. But then after a couple not so great exam scores then I finally went into office hours and talk to my professor and said, what can I do better? How would you recommend I study for this exam or for the quizzes and.

Next thing I knew I was in there every single week getting my homework checked before I turned it in to make sure that I was getting those points back where I could and I started doing a lot better in school your.

Professors also can sometimes become like the mentors and the best people in your life, so you all if you choose to come here and study civil environmental engineering will be Tom Siler. He's The Professor for the introduction to civil and environmental engineering course and him and I still talk on a regular basis.

I'll help him with recruiting events and things like that and he's just become a great mentor. Whenever I have questions or I'm doubting my career path or things like that. So your professors definitely utilize their office hours and as well as your academic advisors, so you are required to meet with your academic advisor every single semester to ensure that you are on the right path and you will graduate whenever you decide you want to graduate. So like I said, I'm doing 4 1/2 years.

Because I have a minor as well and so that has allowed me a little bit more flexibility, however is really important to talk to your academic advisors because they know every single class you have to take, and when you have to take it. Which class has a prerequisite so that you can move on to the next class, and so on. And one thing that is very unique about civil and environmental engineering is that every single civil environmental engineering student has the same academic advisor for those first two years.

And then after that you will sit down with your advisor and say, OK like I'm interested in water resources or structural engineering and they will pair you up with a faculty member or professor. Whoever that has maybe done research or worked in industry in that area or teaches that class and they will become your academic advisor for your last two or three years here at CSU. So then you get really personalized advice and.

Mentorship from then and it's been a fantastic experience. I love my academic advisor.

Her and I have always had great conversations about engineering and she's definitely helped me.

Kind of focused in on where I want to take my career.

That's awesome. Yeah, the civil engineering faculty. I just want to huge shout out. They are amazing and if you went to some of the prior civil engineering sessions for Engineering Exploration Week which was concentrated on Thursday, you have got to meet some of them. Katie mentioned Tom, I'm going to Tom's office hours on Wednesday and just we're just going to catch up 'cause I miss him so much and they're just they're just amazing. Amazing people and wonderful to talk to. Don't be scared to ask questions.

Going off of that again at looking at some study spaces, this is one of my favorite study spaces on campus and is the Internet cafe, which I briefly mentioned earlier. Although there is cafe in the title, they do not have a coffee shop, which is a huge bummer for me. 'cause I love coffee, but it is a great study space. It has computers and printers. Again, like I mentioned earlier where you can print off your assignments, print off your notes, and then I also mentioned that it has a wonderful view of both those labs that we just talked about to on the left. Over the ledge you can see the smash lab or the concrete materials lab.

And on the right you can see the fluids lab and see all those massive machines. It's a really great place to come and work on things in between classes because it is right in the Engineering Building and a majority not a majority but a good amount of your classes are also in the engineering building. So if I have an hour break between two classes, I often come here and just crank something out and it really helped me with time management to use those brakes to my advantage when I'm spending so much time on campus. So I actually love it. It's also great because you see people that you know every single time you go into it.

So if I come in I'm thinking OK, I'm going to work on my.

Now materials, homework and I walk in and I see somebody else who's also working on materials homework and I sit next to them and we work through the problem together and again it really fosters that awesome collaborative environment.

You're also going to be spending a lot of time in a classroom, so we get a lot of questions about class sizes, and I would say that your class sizes converge based on how specific the class itself is. So your freshman year, your classes are going to be quite a bit bigger, especially when they are courses that are taken by majors across the board. So, for example, if you're taking physics, there are going to be engineering majors in physics, there will be physics majors in physics, there will be math majors in physics, same with chemistry you have like.

Pre Med majors you have engineering majors, you have chemistry majors like a little bit of everybody is thrown into the pot in those classes, so they are a little bit bigger. They are think the biggest class I had was probably about 250 ish people. But the nice thing about the large class sizes is it allows you to kind of choose your own adventure and say Hey, do I want to sit in the front and be super engaged to organize? Wanting to sit in the back and absorb the information and kind of do my own thing. So that's really nice to be able to choose where you're sitting, because if you want to make a big class you feel small, you can.

But you can't make a small class feel big. That's my. That's my thing about big class sizes. The other nice thing is that those classes that are larger typically have more support. So not only does the professor have office hours, but they also have a lot of TAS or teaching assistants which also have office hours, and there's additional tutoring for many of those classes through academic village tutoring, which we've talked a little bit about today, as well as tilt, which is the Institute for learning and teaching. They have a lot of tutoring options for all these large classes.

As you progress through your years, your classes will get smaller and smaller. So for example, the class on the right is taught by my man, Doctor Baker, who you may have also met in the civil engineering mock lectures on Thursday. He is great. This is dynamics, which is a class that you take. Or maybe this is statics, one of the two that you take your sophomore year and it's a very fundamental engineering course that Mechanical Engineers, civil engineers and environmental engineers take. So it's a little bit bigger, but he's very, very engaging and knows everybody by name. I think one time I was sitting in the background he called me by name and I was like.

When did you learn my name, but they're very personal and great and I wouldn't be scared off by large class sizes.

Quickly to address the question in the chat, can I use my MacBook Pro or will I need a different computer that is a great question. So I had a Mac for the first 2 years of college and a Mac word works perfect. So the nice thing about having the VPN where you can connect to the engineering server you can connect to it from a Mac and you'll have sort of the Windows Server on your Mac because that's what the server for like the engineering.

Just like home is, so that's really nice. And it works just as well as if you had a PC. So I really liked my Mac. The only way the only reason that I changed it is just 'cause it was like 10 years old and running a little bit slow. But whatever laptop you currently have will most likely Suffice. You don't need to spend 1000 plus dollars on a brand new computer and also you are free to use the computers in the Internet cafe that I just mentioned. Or the engineering residence Hall or Scott bio computers.

And you can get away like your entire four years if you really wanted to, without even having your own computer. Of course, having your computer is very nice for working at home, and things like that, but whatever you have now should be good to go and you don't require like a further investment in something fancy.

But classrooms, I think I covered, sort of how class sizes work. I think the smallest class that I have. Well, classes are a little bit different at right now. 'cause of Covid? So I'm in a class with like 10 people in person, which is really cool, but in general your upper division classes that are like your tech electives that you choose that aren't required are typically a lot smaller and range anywhere from like.

14 the 25 ish people and it's really nice to get to know your professor on a on a personal level. Another quick note about how classes work is there are sort of three different types of classes, so you have your lecture classes which are pictured right here and that's the majority of the classes that you're going to take. Are those lecture based classes the teaching style of professors ranges?

All across the spectrum. So you have teachers that got the power point. You have teachers that write the notes along with you and everywhere in between. The other types of classes that you'll take our labs, which we've talked a lot about recently and those are like a big chunk of time once a week, whereas lectures are more like a small like our long track of time. Three times a week or an hour and 15 minutes twice a week. And then your last type of class, which will most likely occur during your freshman sophomore year, primarily when you're taking those big classes like chemistry and physics.

Are recitations and those are once a week for one hour, taught by atie generally, and they go over content. It's just a place to review and ask questions. It's really relaxed for my physics recitation. We just came in with homework and asked that EA how to do all the homework problems and he just helped us walk through it, which was really great. And then for chemistry the recitation always had a quiz to kind of clarify some concepts. So that's really great to sort of get you into the swing of college and making sure that you understand all those fundamental concepts.

Yes, so I engineers we are very lucky to have our own engineering residential learning community. It is an academic village. The building is just called academic village engineering. Sammy and I both live. There are first years on campus an it was an amazing experience. Sammy is going to touch a little bit more on the student life experience in the residence halls but I just wanted to brief over some of the resources that we have available. Like Sammy said, there was a full computer lab.

So you really don't need your own laptop if you didn't want to purchase one, you can just walk downstairs an use the computers at anytime. They also have printing an even faxing, which I don't know if I was still does that anymore, but there's one down there. I don't know how to use it. There's literally anything you could need down on that first floor. There's also tutoring every single night Sunday through Thursday every night offers tutoring on things like calculus and physics and chemistry. All of those general engineering classes that everyone has to take.

And then every night has its own specialization. So TAS for the introduction to mechanical engineering course will be there. Sunday nights and introduction to civil and environmental engineering. They'll be there on Tuesday nights, and so on. And it's really nice because the professors will usually schedule homework due dates after those nights so that you if you do need help, you can go to the tutoring with those teaching assistance and get help on the homework.

I think that's it. There's so many more resources on there, but if you want more information, we did a webinar on the engineering residential learning community earlier this afternoon and that will be available on our YouTube channel early next week.

Alright, I'm sure you all are curious what the rooms look like, so here are a couple of photos of a sample room and it's really nice. I would say that a majority of the halls on campus. The rooms themselves are about the size of the carpeted area that you see on the bottom right corner, but the benefit of the rooms in academic village is there much larger because you have your very own bathroom, which is kind of rare for college living situations, so it's just you and your roommate get your very own bathroom shower, toilet, sink.

On and it's very very nice. Also it gets cleaned every other week. You don't have to clean it. It's so nice you only only thing you have to worry about. As far as like Adulting goes, your first year is laundry, but if somebody is cleaning your bathroom people are making you food dining halls. It's so nice so enjoy it. It's also nice. I really appreciate how the sink is outside of the normal bathroom so you can see the sink on the right and then on the left there's a door to the bathroom itself which has the shower and the toilet so you and your roommate can get.

Ready simultaneously and not be in each others space, or you not fighting to like open the door when you really need your toothbrush kind of thing. It's all right there. What's not pictured is the closet, which is a pretty sizable normal size closet. You and your roommate share it. It has mirrors and sliding doors so you don't have to bring your own mirror or anything like that. And then that whole space. Like I said, everywhere from the door where you enter to where the carpet starts, gets cleaned every other week and then going into the more like living area. It's kind of like a little apartment you have, like your little.

Bathroom area that you walk in your living space and that includes for each resident. So typically two people per room. You get a dresser or you have a desk, a chair of file cabinet and then your bed frame with a little like shelf where you can put your alarm Clock or whatever and your bed can be lofted at three different Heights. So on the top left photo the very left bed is the highest that you can loft it and then the one on the right is a medium loft height. You can also have it loaded the ground but nobody really does that unless you really want to. Katie does, there you go. It's easier to get in and out. I'll say that.

I had the surgery freshman year so mine was on the lowest it could go.

That's a very valid reason, yes. So it's really, really great. Also, the ceilings are really high, so you're not going to break your head and lots of wall space for decoration and making it your own and rearranging and things like that. And that is honestly maybe one of the things that I was the most excited about for college was having my own space and being able to decorate it an I absolutely loved it. Makes a great thought to just have like movie nights with your roommates and everything like that. It's also great to just go across the Hall over the first week that I moved in.

So the halls I lived in an all girls floor in academic village engineering and we all were meeting each other for the first time. Just because one person went to the first room in the Hall and knocked on the door and said, Oh my gosh, can I come see how you decorated your room and then they were like, yeah, come on in and they're like, oh, can I see yours? And then the group just grew and grew and grew as we went down the Hall and saw everybody's room. So it's really fun and a wonderful space to build community.

Other than that, that is pretty much all that we have for you as far as the Civil Engineering specific tour we do have about 15 minutes left until we're officially. Our time is officially up. So if you have any questions please throw them in the group chat. We would love to answer and like I said, This is a little bit of a smaller session. Not as many people, so we want to kind of be in tune with what you need and what questions you have, so please ask us anything.

To even think to add Katie or.

I was going to say if no one has any questions, we can kind of just.

Start oh did any of you do honors to how hard was it or exami take it away.

Oh yeah, so I'm in the honors program and I think I've heard that this is true. Yes, this is a statistic where engineering is the most represented major in the honors program, so a lot of people ask, like, oh, does it add too much? Is it too hard to be engineering an honors? And the answer is no, it's just two. It's like a different type of learning, and so give you a brief rundown of what the Honors Program.

Is is it? It's essentially just a different way of fulfilling your core requirements in college. So just like in high school, I'm sure all of you had to complete X amount of math X amount of Science X amount of reading and are like Humanities and things like that same deal is with college, so you have all your major classes and then to graduate from the University. You need a certain amount of like arts and Humanities and things that aren't covered by your major. So instead of taking lecture based arts class like.

Music appreciation. You would take an honor seminar about a variety of different topics so my seminars have one of them was about how consumerism affects the environment, how all the things that we use, like how the materials are extracted, how that affects the environment, how we dispose of those materials, and how that impacts the environment, which is really cool to see. Like the life cycle analysis and apply that to like materials and engineering. Also another honor seminar I had was about animals and art, and we got to go to a farm for a field trip. We got to FaceTime, a chimpanzee and things like that. Actually, sorry it wasn't a random.

Orangutan my teacher would get mad at me if I called him chimpanzee anyway, so they're really really crazy topics. Very fun, very not related to engineering most the time which is really good. The other benefit of honors is you get to take honors options or honor sections of courses in your major. So I took honors statics, an honor solids which are two fundamental civil courses and that allowed me to be in a smaller class size and do a little additional project or some additional go over some additional content as well as get to know my professor a little bit more.

And then the final thing you do with honors is an honors thesis. And the nice thing about doing engineering as well is you're already doing your senior capstone, which is your senior design project and that covers your honors thesis and the honors thesis just challenges you to look more into it and write a little bit of extra analysis about what your project is. So overall, it's not much harder necessarily, it is just a different way to learn and how to get those core credits of the way, and definitely more like discussion based.

And you do have to give like speeches and write papers and things like that as opposed to your regular core classes where you just sit and absorb information and take a test.

Awesome, so we have another question and it says what Coop's are. Internships are available for environmental engineering and International Development, so I've had a couple different internships. My first internship was with a small civil engineering firm in California and we were working on a lot of regulatory.

Safety and health regulations. Things like that. I found out that that is not the Avenue that I wanted to go with in my career, but Luckily it was early on so I have had another internship in water resources that I absolutely love. I get to use chainsaws everyday and run some water, and it's been really fun related to International Development. I am currently looking into international engineering firms for full time employment once I graduate.

I have done a lot of 3rd party volunteering with in disaster related.

And recovery programs. I would say a lot of it has just been me researching nonprofits and NGOs and finding ones that are sustainable and ones that I like so a lot of.

People or different organizations might think that they're doing good temporarily, but then they leave and it's their projects and everything. You're not sustainable, so that's one of the things that I look at when I'm looking at volunteering with NGOs or whatever across the world. Is their sustainability and what are what is their mission? Their values? Did they stay longer way after the natural disaster? Whatever it may be, an are there designs sustainable in implementation and maintenance?

So I've done quite a few projects abroad. My most recent wine was last summer. I was in Uganda in Africa for 3 1/2 weeks. Drilling water Wells an improving their sanitation system and things like that. I've done a lot after hurricanes reboot, rebuilding homes and things like that and I would really say just on the topic of International Development and engineering. To really, I'd recommend to look at our list of minors we have.

Over 100 minors at CSU and some of them compare very nicely with engineering. Even if you might think it does, it sometimes can complement engineering very well. So one popular one for civil engineering is construction management. Or we have a sustainable water minor. A lot of Environmental Engineering students will minor in Wildlife Conservation biology, or like my minor in International Development. It's not stem related, so I wasn't sure how it would pair.

With engineering, but like I said, now that I'm in my final year an I looked at the engineering technical electives list. I'm in a class called engineering water engineering and International Development, so it literally could not pair any Better Together. But internships and Co. OPS it.

I think they're pretty easy to find like I said at our career fair. We also have someone in the engineering success center who will try to help you find those internships and help you get prepared for those interviews, and go over your resume your academic advisors will also be sending you emails all semester long with people who reach out to them with a job application and job availability for internships and full-time employment and that's how I got my internship my advisor emailed this through an I said wow that looks fun.

Ann, I applied for it and that's how I got my current internship.

Great question.

What organizations do good question for Katie?

Yeah, so one of my most favorite ones is called all hands and hearts. I forget the year it was founded. It was after the hurricane in the Philippines and they have locations all over the world. I have volunteered with them in Puerto Rico twice. I'm looking at going into their Nepal location soon. They have a lot of earthquakes there, so structural engineering is huge there.

With earthquake resistant buildings, yeah I would say that some of the hardest things I've ever done. I did not know that I was claustrophobic until I was in a full hazmat suit removing mold and asbestos from people's homes because after the hurricane everything just stayed damp and got moldy and it started making people sick and but it's again so rewarding is definitely worth those couple hours feeling claustrophobic when.

Um, the little boy who was living in the home who's who's home we were fixing. He was saying that he can't wait to go back to school and not be sick anymore. It was just so heartwarming. It makes it all worth it.

But a lot of the other ones, we also have an engineers Without Borders chapter on campus. I was involved with that a little bit my first year. However, I like just going. That's something that I've had to work on with Engineering. Is the planning process. And while I respect it and I enjoy the planning and design process, I also like just jumping in and being able to go whenever I want. So the one that I went to Africa with was called aid Africa.

And so yeah, there's just a bunch of different resources. But yeah, definitely do your research on their sustainability aspects.

Yeah, those are huge draw to civil and environmental engineering for me is. I think it's you can change the world and help the world with any engineering degree, but I just really saw like the practicality of civil and environmental, especially International Development. So if that's something that you're interested in, this is a really great field. And I remember the 1st.

I went to the Diner Museum of nature and science the summer before I entered college and there was a documentary called.

Dream big engineering our world and there was a little bit of a story about this organization called bridges to prosperity, which was an organization that builds bridges to connect communities to resources they wouldn't otherwise have. And it's just so cool. And I watched it and I was like that is so neat and definitely like what I want to do. And so it's a really great great major to be in if that is your area of interest in K. Just through her email in the chat. So if you have more questions about it, she is a star. She is so involved she's done so many cool things.

So she is a great person to contact if that is something that interests you, and I'll probably contact Katie about those same things too. And we like know each other so she's great.

Are there any other questions that we can help to answer? We got 6 minutes left but also is not the end of the world. If we let you guys go early.

Wow, you're awesome too. Thank you.

Right?

OK Sammy I have a question.

OK.

Your least favorite class and why?

Oh

probably I'm not a big coding fan, so probably numerical modeling and risk analysis like it sounds like it would be fun, but it was just really nitty gritty. Details that I didn't get to see like I love making something and having something to show for what I made. So like concrete was really fun 'cause I'll go look at this what I mean. And then if you're writing code is kind of harder to see that, so that was probably my least favorite class for that reason.

What about you?

Yeah, I would definitely say that class was really hard. I would say that was my least favorite class while I was going through it. However, since.

Really going through that class, it has actually been one of the classes that I've used the most.

Uh huh.

We learned in that class in using both Excel and Matlab. I would not loving life while we were in that class. However, after being in that class, I realized how important it was and the everything we learned. I do all the time at my job risk analysis.

Absolutely.

So it's been. It's been very important to have that class, even though love it going through it. It's been great since then.

Absolutely, and that's kind of the the moral of the story for engineering in general. Is people talking up there like Oh, it's so hard like you must be so smart like good for you? Pats on the back, kind of like a like a sympathy Pat on the back like you're going to near. You must work so hard and you do and it is challenging but at the end of the day like we do it because we are passionate about changing the world, about being innovative in about helping people. And really at the end of the day it all makes it worth it. Like you said Katie.

But if there aren't anymore questions, we can go ahead and log off. I know that all of you have had a super long day Ann. I just commend you for sticking through it. I know it's hard to stare at your computer for so long and we've been doing it too. So thank you for listening. Thank you for being engaged. Thank you for asking questions, and please let us know if you have any other questions or email. I don't know if it's in the chat already, but I'll put it in the chat right now.

If you have any questions at all, please feel free to reach out to us that way and we would love to continue to be a resource for you. Pass this event and help you with all the crazy decisions that are yet to come. But they're going to be great.

Also, thank you Sammy. Yeah they offer the next few minutes, but feel free to log out. Is any more questions?

Alright, I think we're done.

Probably going to closeout, having the rest of your night, Katie.

Thanks you too. I'm sure I'll see you probably tomorrow.

Oh yes, I'll see you in class.

Fine.