Computer Science Vs Civil Engineering

Hi Mark,

I'm going to answer your question a bit more directly since I have always been split on both of those same exact interests. My education and career however have always followed the CS/IT track. My interests in Civil Engineering have always been around transportation and utilities.

A few thoughts that may be helpful with your exploration:
Programming is becoming as ubiquitous a skill in the workforce as math. 7 years olds are learning to program. You'll find that qualifying as a computer scientist or software engineer can land you a lucrative job in software, but you'll also find that if you have programming skills you have a competitive edge in other positions, too.
Both positions allow you to continue learning the domain once you start a full time job. Expect that a software position would be in faster-paced environment than civil engineering.
Software engineering will also be more fluid, always a new language, software model to learn; whereas a civil engineering career will have a lot more static standards and methods.
Consider what type of organization you would want to work for. Private or public sector? Software/Tech companies are incredibly diverse in size, pace of change, markets, and so on. Civil engineering has large and small companies - some that work per project and others that provide ongoing services. Consider how often one of these companies has to cut staff when they lose a bid, or work overtime when they gain business before having enough staff. Government is another area to consider. I'll let people more familiar with that space to comment.

I'll leave you with this: 3 years after I started my professional career in IT I strongly considered going back to school for Civil Engineering. I was doing very well in IT, but couldn't shake the itch to work on something more... physical. I think I would have been successful and happy either way because I knew I liked both. I continued by IT career. A couple years later my younger cousin entered college in Civil Engineering and after graduation, landed a great job consulting on transportation systems. I couldn't have been more envious! But! ... in the years that followed, every time we talk about his work I have come to accept that the pace and details he works with require a more patience mode of operation than what I'm optimized for.

When you have two good options, but a complex decision to make, the success of your decision will be based not on the decision itself, but on how well you apply yourself to it.

Good luck Mark.

Paul

Mark,

I agree totally with Ken Simmons. You need to know who you are before you can choose the right career. Figuratively speaking, what size are your feet? Are they wide or narrow? what kinds of shoes have you liked in the past? I'm nearing 60 and realize I got my engineering degree for the wrong reasons, I also got my education degree without a careful look at how I deal with children. I thought that great desire would help. It might when you are 20 or 25. But now I need to figure out what I want to do for the rest of my career.

I went to the Texas Workforce Office near my home and talked to a person there. I explained my situation and they listened and helped me find a path. I'm just starting it.

It's good that you are thinking ahead to when you transfer. Asking for help is a great idea, but the decision is up to you. You can't pass this decision over to someone else. What is your plan to come up with a decision? What steps in the plan will help you know you have made the best decision you can, given the time you have available to put into making the decision, and the information about each alternative you have been able to gather and process?

Your school has a career center to help students find jobs after they graduate, or help them move to the next step in their education. Be sure to connect with them and see what they can offer you, that you can put into your personal plan. .

Connect with a lot of people and ask them about their work. Especially civil engineers and computer science graduates. Find out what talent and abilities they have that help them with their work, and the kinds of personalities they have seen that have not been successful in that kind of work.

Here's a couple more ideas you can investigate and see if there is anything you can put in your plan.

https://careerdfw.org/J/
http://www.southlakefocusgroup.com/ I know Southlake is a long drive from Katy (you will probably have to spend the night before to get there by 7:30 when the networking starts), and you will need to attend at least twice to get the benefit of meeting others (because the first session is an orientation packed full of great information). But it is a great place to meet professionals in lots of fields and learn the in's and outs of job search. Learn it now and practice it now, so you are good at it when you need it. Connect with them to see if they are meeting over the holidays while you are between semesters.

Here's advice that have given to kids on this board about finding out about who you are.

There are three resources that I recommend to help you figure out the type of person you are, what your strengths are, and what your special talents are. After you know this, you can find the careers that are best suited for who you are. You like to read books, so let me recommend three books.

One is the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). This measures how you (as a person) take in information, how you process it, and how you output it. Engineers fit into certain categories of personality types. A good book to read about this is Do What You Are: Discover the Perfect Career for You Through the Secrets of Personality Type by Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger. Your school career center may know how you can take the MBTI assessment, and may be able to provide help in interpreting it. Even without taking the assessment, the book can give you a good idea of the personality type you have, and you can read about the kinds of careers that people with that personality type do well in.

Another resource is Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath. The cost of the assessment is built into the cost of the book, so if you get a used one, be sure it has an unused access code. The basic idea of this book is that you come into the world with certain strengths, and it won't make much difference on how hard you work on your weaknesses, you will get a lot more results by putting the same effort into working with your top five strengths. Page 9 says, "You cannot be anything you want to be, but you can be a lot more of who you already are. " It does not give as much advice about what careers to choose, but if your strengths are different from those that are supportive of engineering, you should look elsewhere for a career.

Third, in his book, Goals, How to Get Everything You Want - Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible, Brian Tracy tells how to find your special talents. On pages 123 and 124 he lists 8 ways to discover what your special talent is. Notice how one of them is "easy for you to learn and easy for you to do"
1. You love to do it.
2. You do it well.
3. This talent has been responsible for most of your success and happiness in life up till now. (Something you have enjoyed doing from an early age.)
4. It is easy for you to learn and easy for you to do.
5. It holds your attention (naturally you talk about it, you think about it, you learn about it).
6. You love to learn about it and desire to excel in this area.
7. When you do it, times stands still for you. You can go for long hours without eating or sleeping because you are so involved in it.
8. You really admire and respect those who are good at what you are most suited to do. You want to emulate them.

Another thing to remember about your career, whatever career it is, is that you are getting paid to solve problems. The more people you help, the more you get paid. the better the solution is, the better you get paid. Whatever you do, do it the best that you can. Don't take shortcuts either in your schooling or in doing what you are paid to do. Integrity is highly valued, don't cheat yourself out of it. The more Integrity you have, the more people will trust you to solve their problems that are within your skill set.

Finally, remember, there is a God in heaven. You are his Child and He loves you. You came to this earth for a reason and if you get in tune with His spirit and ask, He will let you know what your purpose is, what major you should take and He will guide you in what is best for you and those around you. He will guide, but you have to do the work and you have to stay in tune with his spirit. Mostly, He will only guide you a few steps at a time, so you demonstrate your faith in Him by taking the actions He tells you to take.

This depends on your passion,your interest, knowledge and your hard work analyze yourself then choose one.

If you like working in the open and love designing and drawing choose civil. But if you want to work in an ac room sitting on a chair in front of a PC choose computer. Computer science is comfortable branch and has more scope especially onsite opportunities.

Computer science- branch with a high scope for campus placement especially if you see yourself in Infosys, Wipro,Microsoft,Google,Facebook or other CS/IT company. If you love roaming around your PC and had a interest to have insider knowledge and software development then CS/IT is the right choice.

Civil- Relatively easier with a high scope of government as well as private sector in India as India requires design infrastructure and civil will be in high demand so long as infrastructure exists. I should say too that sometimes these two fields intersect and likely will intersect more in the future.

Mark,

Teh problem with your question is that both of those fields are also very vast within themselves. Civil engineering runs the gamut from soils to construction, to reinforced concrete, to urban planning, to transportation engineering, to earthwords and beyond. My BS is in general Civil Engineering and I have an MS in Civil Engineering with a concentration in Construction Engineering Management.

As for computer science, part of computer science is indeed the computer part. However the other part is understanding the needs of your customer (whomever that customer may be). If you are working on computer support systems for the medical field, you need to know something about how the medical field works. Of course you could be donig put computer science research type work where the application comes after the product is developed.

However, back to your case. I work in telecomm, and until recently my job was to act as an interface betwen engineers (the customer) and the IT group (who were creating the system tools the engineers use). I had one foot in both worlds. I have found that its not so much the technical aspects of engineering that you learn, but the critical thinking skills and mindset.

What part of Civil Engineering appeals to you? Is it the heavy constrution, is it design, is it urban planning, earthworks? Depending on where your interests lie, you may be able to position yourself to do both Civil Enginerring and Computer Science.

Just a word to the wise. I used to love the down and dirty engineering aspect of Civil Engineering. I worked for a Geotechnical Engineering firm. I was the field engineer on a numebr of heavy construction sites - dam remediations, pile driving, development of previously undeveloped land (me, an excavatior, and surveying equipment a mile into the woods). It was fun at the time, but eventually working in the cold, heat, snow, and rain looses its charm. I still love the outdoors, but on my terms now, not as a way to earn a living. Just something to keep in mind depending on what sort of job you are looking for,.