Why choose CEE for a career?

Advancing civil and environmental engineering is both intellectually challenging and essential for sustaining and improving our quality of life. People who choose CEE as a career are people who are determined to make a difference in the world. Civil and environmental engineers design, build and improve different types of structures. They control and manage the use of natural resources, and develop new technology to control and remediate pollution. Civil and environmental engineers are creative designers and inventors.

The need for civil engineers continually increases because growth in human populations and economic activities intensify the stresses humans place on Earth and on the infrastructure that they have put in place to support their activities.The consequences of those stresses are increasingly evident. For example, environmental impacts range from changes in various elemental cycles in soil, atmosphere, and water bodies, habitat degradation, the hole in the ozone layer, to global warming). Problems associated with aging of urban infrastructure include bridge and highway deterioration, outdated water supply and waste management systems. New needs to protect the population have emerged from manmade threats such as biological and chemical terrorism, structural blast damage, and other homeland security issues as well as natural disasters such earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and forest fires. All these issues create a need for skilled civil and environmental engineers.

Civil and environmental engineers play a key role to play in addressing these issues by advancing our knowledge in such diverse areas as solid mechanics, environmental fluid dynamics, structural dynamics and adaptivity, smart materials technology, and molecular biology, among many others.

Duke recognizes the value of multidisciplinary research in these areas--and Duke excels at helping students to develop cross-disciplinary curriculum programs that suit the individual's particular interests.