Modernizing Structural Analysis and Design Education

As structural engineers in practice continue to improve their methods and advance their analysis and design techniques through the use of new technology, how should structural engineering education programs evolve as well to match the increasing complexity of the industry? This thesis serves to analyze the many differing opinions and techniques on modernizing structural engineering education programs through a literature review on the content put out by active structural engineering education reform committees, articles and publications by well-known educators and practitioners, and a series of interviews conducted with key individuals specifically for this project. According to the opinions analyzed in this paper, structural engineering education should be a 5-year program that ends with a master’s degree, so that students obtain enough necessary knowledge to begin their positions as structural engineers. Firms would rather continue the education of new-hires themselves after this time than to wait and pay more for students to finish longer graduate-type programs. Computer programs should be implemented further into education programs, and would be most productive not as a replacement to hand-calculation methods, but as a supplement. Students should be tasked with writing codes, so that they are required to implement these calculations into computer programs themselves, and use classical methods to verify their answers. In this way, engineering programs will be creating critical thinkers who can adapt to any new structural analysis and design programs, and not just be training students on current programs that will become obsolete with time. It is the responsibility of educators to educate current staff on how to implement these coding methods seamlessly into education as a supplement to hand calculation methods. Students will be able to learn what is behind commercial coding software, develop their hand-calculation skills through code verification, and focus more on the ever-important modeling and interpretation phases of problem solving. Practitioners will have the responsibility of not expecting students to graduate with knowledge of specific software programs, but instead recruiting students who showcase critical thinking skills and understand the backbone of these programs. They will continue the education of recent graduates themselves, providing them with real-world experience that they cannot receive in school while training them to use company-specific analysis and design software.