Exploring Engineering Ep. 04: Civil and Environmental Engineering

Adda Athanasopoulos Zekkos
The first thing I ask is, please raise your hand if you used a toilet this morning. And of course, you get the giggles. Everybody’s looking like, what is this gonna be about? Like, you know, she’s talking about toilets, right? Three words into her little thing. And of course, everybody raises their hand. And then, you know, I’m like, how many people turn their faucet to drink water, and you get where this is going. But the fact is, we do so many things every single day that relate back to Civil Environmental Engineering.

Laura Vogt
As you just heard from Adda Athanasopoulos Zekkos, UC Berkeley civil engineering faculty member, civil engineering is really all around us, from the ground to the sky. It’s the basis for housing, energy, transportation, water, and so much more.

Hi, I’m Laura Vogt, and in this episode of Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley, I’m featuring conversations with a faculty member, alumni, and a recent bachelor of science graduate to tell you more about civil engineering. As the podcast producer and host, I’m looking forward to sharing what I learned about civil engineering and the opportunities that studying it can bring you.

Our first conversation today is with Adda Athanasopoulos Zekkos, who sat down with Sarah Yang, Assistant Dean for Marketing and Communications in the College of Engineering.

Adda Athanasopoulos Zekkos
I’m Adda Athanasopoulos Zekkos. I’m a faculty member at the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department here at UC Berkeley.

I didn’t know that I was going to be a civil and environmental engineer until near the end of high school. I’m kind of a unique case. Well, maybe not so unique, but my father is a Civil Environmental Engineer, and I think, as most children, I had very strongly declared that whatever I’m gonna do with my life, the one thing I won’t do is be like you, and therefore be a civil and environmental engineer.

Sarah Yang
Oh, that’s so typical, but very, very typical.

Adda Athanasopoulos Zekkos
Yes, like, I’m not going to be that, you know, I’m going to look into other things. And I think, like many children also, it’s difficult to be exposed to the details of different professions and therefore have formulated this crystal clear idea at the age of 14 or 15. You know, that I want to be this? Do these kids exist? Obviously, they do exist, but I was not one of them. And I talk with a lot of undergraduate students here who did not feel that revelation came very early on.

And sometimes that produces anxiety, because you see someone next to you, and they know exactly what they want to be. They know exactly how to get there. And sometimes you think to yourself, you know, am I that behind? Like, you know, should I have my whole future figured out by this point, right? And a lot of times I’ll tell them, No, like, it’s not, you know, a problem that you don’t have everything figured out right now.

But it maybe starts with, what are the topics and the subjects you’re enjoying in school, right? What are the ones where you don’t feel it’s such a burden when it’s time to do that specific homework? Is it writing a book report? Is it solving, you know, an extra math problem? Is it doing the extra credit for the physics class? Is it the fact that you don’t want to leave when the music class is over, right? So you start thinking about those things. And this is how I had approached it also as a kid in middle school and high school, trying to see what am I gravitating towards? And for me, that was math, physics, chemistry, and so I knew I was going to be somewhere STEM-related, which is still incredibly broad, right? It can include many, many different things.

And then I think slowly, as I was getting ready for, you know, the college application and entry exam, I started to kind of look through different professions that included application of physics, of math, of chemistry, of all these things. And engineering, of course, is one of the first ones that pops up. And among those, civil engineering really attracted my attention because I felt I could see the impact it was having all around me. I could see why it was very important to have a bridge to connect point A to point B. So that takes you 10 minutes to get somewhere, versus three hours if you had to go all the way around. Or, like we were saying before, the importance of having clean drinking water, safe infrastructure, all of these things started to connect with me a little bit more.

Sarah Yang
Do you feel like there are misconceptions about the disciplines? Are there some myths you want to bust about the field?

Adda Athanasopoulos Zekkos
This is, this is a fun one. I think, you know, I’m sure there’s misconceptions about a lot of fields out there. But one that I’ve always thought about for Civil and Environmental Engineers is the whole love of building with Legos.

Sarah Yang
Oh, like, that’s the stereotype, right?

Adda Athanasopoulos Zekkos
We have boxes and boxes of them in my garage, but it’s just interesting to see how many essays and personal statements I’m gonna read. You know, the beginning of a sentence of, you know, ever since I was four, I love to play with Legos. And so, just to clarify, nothing wrong with Legos, feel free to play with Legos. But just don’t think that you have to have a love for Legos to be a civil and environmental engineer.

And therefore, if you don’t, you know, see, it’s not for you, you know. But some other things I think are, you know, we started this discussion by talking about math and physics and chemistry, and obviously these topics play a very important role, as we can imagine. You know, given what we do in engineering. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that you also don’t have to be this genius.

You know, talking about plasma and quantum physics or whatever, and I probably messed up some term now that a colleague of mine in the physics department is going to be mad at, but that kind of goes to show you, right, that you don’t have to be at that level to study Civil and Environmental Engineering. I think it’s true what we said earlier, that it shouldn’t also be something that you really dislike, because then it’s just going to make it more miserable for you to go through the curriculum.

But I think that’s another thing that sometimes is a little bit of a misconception, like the level at which you need to have the understanding of very advanced math or physics or chemistry as you move through the years of your undergraduate and then perhaps eventually a graduate degree. Then you might end up specializing more in something, but at that point, you’re doing it around a topic that you have now realized you really enjoy and you really love doing, and so at that point, it won’t even feel like learning, because you just want to do it right to improve yourself.

And I think another thing is that, you know, we don’t just build buildings. We are everywhere you see any type of infrastructure that brings any type of quality to your everyday life. So dams, whether they’re being used for irrigation, for energy, those are part of civil engineering projects. Bridges, tunnels, subways, the whole water treatment and water preservation, but also where is groundwater going and coming from, right? So these cycles of floods versus droughts, and how that’s affecting the water that we have underground, and how that further goes towards other sources and replenishing, you know, groundwater that used to be somewhere but is no longer there.

There’s just so many dimensions that, I think, you know, listening to podcasts like this or other shows, you know, just Google. I mean, nowadays, students have so much information at their fingertips, and there’s really so many wonders that civil and environmental engineers are involved in.

We have a very strong relationship with high technologies when it comes to sensing, for example. I think that’s another misconception that because we’re kind of an older profession, we have outdated technologies, or maybe not technology at all. I don’t know. Sometimes I hear these things, and then I look at some of my colleagues and some of the incredibly advanced sensors they use to replicate, you know, or measure, you know, deformation and load or create models, you know, for virtual reality models and all sorts of things.

I mean, you know, I could go on, but basically, I think that if you have a love for any of these things, you can definitely find a home in civil and environmental engineering.

Laura Vogt
I was also able to talk with two alum from civil engineering who both have careers in the public sector. Parson Galicia spoke of his desire to study STEM but having to research what aspect of STEM would be best for him. Our second alum, Kimberly Leung, tells us about her work in transportation in San Francisco, how she chose transportation engineering, and how you could learn more about the study of it.

Parson Galicia
My name is Parson Galicia. I graduated with a civil engineering degree in 2021 and then I followed up with that with a master’s degree also in civil engineering in 2022. You know, throughout my college degree, I was fortunate enough to have participated in many different engineering-wide groups and also just civil engineering department-wide groups.
In high school, I always knew that, for one thing, I was very talkative. Doesn’t really matter what the subject was, I almost always had an opinion on it, good or bad things. So I knew I was really talkative. But I also really like STEM, specifically mathematics.

Within STEM, I went through the entire trouble of, like, you know, I had to make sure I go talk to a counselor. I tried talking to my teachers at the time to figure out what it is I’m interested in in college that I can further enhance that knowledge. And I’m not gonna lie, it was a very difficult process, just because I always had to ask myself, like, what are you interested in? Well, why do you want to go that route?

So I think being self-inquisitive, I guess you can describe that, is really important in that process, before you pick a major, just because you want to make sure that, you know, there’s enough material in there that you want to keep scratching and keep figuring out. And for me, that ended up being civil engineering, because for one thing, it is very STEM focused.

And civil engineers tend to be that fabric in between the very technical stuff that happens, you know, behind the scenes, and what people see from the public’s perspective. So we’re that middle, middle line folks, so we need to be able to communicate the very technical stuff in such a way that we’re not scared of the public. We want to communicate that we’re taking care of and we’re taking care of the facilities that the public uses.

Laura Vogt
And so I know civil engineering has a lot of different tracks, like we were talking about, how did you decide where you were going to go within civil engineering?

Parson Galicia
That kind of came on a trial and error basis. Fortunately, at Berkeley, you had the opportunity to pick and choose several basic courses in each facet of civil engineering. I’m going to throw out some names, but this is not going to capture everything in civil engineering. But you could take stuff in geotechnical engineering, structural engineering, transportation, wastewater.

There’s a bunch of aspects in sustainability and construction. There’s a ton in civil engineering, like we were discussing earlier.
So I wanted to make sure that, you know, hey, I know I didn’t want to be a wastewater engineer because I took a wastewater course and it just didn’t stick with me. I wanted to be able to root my decision from a particular experience that I’ve had within my very data-dependent brain that’s sinking into those decisions. That’s kind of how I was able to weed through the vast umbrella of civil engineering to figure out exactly where I wanted to go.

And for the folks listening, is it really that it doesn’t just happen in school? Once you graduate, you may have some of these questions where you’re like, I really want to do this, or what is it about this particular field that I’m really interested in?

I think I still maintain that self-inquisitive perspective that I had in school, and I carry that over through my career choices to land me in my current role as an engineer with the City of Oakland Department of Transportation. I ended up finding myself in this position again. I like talking to people. I like STEM. STEM kind of matured into this more of a project management perspective, and so I found a job with the City of Oakland, which has been paying off greatly at this time. That allowed me to maintain both of those interests, being able to scratch my STEM-related brain and also talking to a lot of people.

Laura Vogt
If you were talking to students now that were either in high school or community college and they were trying to figure out how to learn more about civil engineering, do you have any advice for them?

Parson Galicia
I think, ask as many questions as you possibly can of yourself and also of the folks that you look up to in this space. So for those who are fortunate enough to have to know people directly in this space of civil engineering, could be parents, aunts, uncles, random people, to be honest, that’s more of an acceptable form now because of LinkedIn. You’re able to reach out to them directly.

But if there’s anyone within your network, or if you have a friend that knows a friend that just happens to work in this field, I would highly encourage you to ask them questions most of the time.

When I was doing this, it was always a welcome approach to ask someone who was already doing the job that you think you want to do, you know, in the near future, and basically giving yourself the opportunity to skip four years just to get an insight from someone who’s already working the job. Or if you know students who are currently civil engineering students in whatever university, ask them directly, they’ll pretty much tell you everything there is to know about civil engineering or the role that you’re asking them to tell you about.

Yeah, it’s just asking as many questions as possible because you never know what’s going to happen when you start asking those questions of, like, ooh, civil engineering has too much construction associated with it. Maybe that’s not really for me. Let me rethink that.

And you kind of need to be honest with yourself to figure out, is this something you really want to do, or you don’t have to be absolutely sure that this is what you want to do, but there has to be enough material there for you to remain engaged.

Kimberly Leung
My name is Kimberly Leung. I’m currently the Louisville Streets Director at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. So I graduated from Berkeley in 2010 with my bachelor’s in civil and environmental engineering, and then I stayed for another year and graduated with my master’s in transportation engineering in 2011.

So when I was in high school, I loved math and science, and I wanted to do something practical, you know, with those interests. So engineering seemed like a natural fit. I was going into civil engineering thinking that I was gonna, you know, build cool things like bridges and buildings. And that clearly is not the case. That is not what I do now.

As the Streets Director at the SFMTA, I oversee all of San Francisco’s programs for bicycle and pedestrian capital improvements, traffic calming, Bike Share, and the school crossing guard program. So the work that I do here is really focused on active transportation, but in order to get here, you know, I started off as an engineer, kind of made my way up in the agency, working as a project manager, and then eventually a program manager.

I think people don’t fully know, like, what civil engineering is, and it took me a while to actually realize that it’s not just building structures. There’s so many different areas, and transportation was probably the field that I gravitated towards because it felt to be the most hands-on, like you can kind of go out there at a street corner and really get a sense of what transportation is. You stand out there, you see cars moving, you see people coming by on bikes. You see signals.

So, you know, once I kind of saw that as a focus area that you could do as a civil engineer, I started taking all those classes to kind of get an understanding of, like, what does a transportation engineer do? So it was really going into those electives in my upper division courses that helped me kind of understand what was like in the transportation world. I remember at Cal there were two courses in undergrad where you were actually exposed to all the different areas of civil engineering. So there was CE 92, just kind of like your intro to, just like, what is civil engineering? That was a great way to kind of hear from different guest speakers about the different focus areas of engineering.

You know, I would say that, you know, organizations like ASCE have also been really great in helping, you know, folks learn more about the different areas within the industry. And internships are also amazing to kind of dabble in these different areas. Like, if you start early, you can, like, go through a few different internships before you graduate and kind of have a better sense of where you may want to end up in the engineering field.

Laura Vogt
Our final interview today is with Nelson Jurado. He shared how he chose to study Civil Engineering after being interested in construction and then interning with an engineering firm, plus a little bit about how civil engineering has the potential to impact your world.

Nelson Jurado
My name is Nelson Jurado. I’m a civil engineering major. I started off interested in construction because I always kind of grew up around it. There was a lot of construction in my neighborhood and remodeling being done in my house, and I kind of had this kind of fascination for seeing how a structure is built and how it’s, you know, constructed over time. But I was always kind of unsure whether engineering would be my thing, or whether I would go to the medical field.

In fact, I went to a Medical Magnet High School in downtown Los Angeles, so that played a big role in a lot of my internships in high school. They were almost all actually at hospitals, which was an amazing experience, and it taught me a lot. But I felt like engineering was more and more what I wanted to do towards the end of it. So I got a final internship between the end of my high school and the start of my time here at Berkeley. And I worked at this company called Martin Bros in Los Angeles. They’re known for doing a bunch of things in LA like the Walt Disney Concert Hall or SoFi Stadium. They’ve done a lot.

And one of the cool things that they exposed me to was this side of construction that isn’t—or at least to me, it wasn’t known—that there’s, you know, you think of it as more of a traditional industry that maybe hasn’t become as evolved as like other, you know, majors like CS. And so I was stunned to see that there was a lot of advancements in augmented reality technologies that were being utilized to kind of build out an entire structure before anything had been laid down. It was all being done in a computer with something called Building Information Modeling, or BIM.

And I really was kind of intrigued, and it opened me to think about the industry in a different light, seeing how I could kind of fit into it as it was growing. I think one of the things about my experiences at Berkeley was this class I took—all the History and Practice of Human Rights. I took it about six months before I started the REU site. And during that time, I had been kind of going through a lot. I had undergone, like, a right shoulder surgery, dog attack, a jaw dislocation, all within the span of, like, a few weeks, believe it or not.

And it was such a unique time for me, because I was taking this class that was discussing human rights, accessibility, and the impact that me as a student could have on the world. And, you know, I really felt like this experience taking that class kind of allowed me to look outside of myself for these extrinsic motivations. Like, I was able to see that others were suffering around the world, and there had to be a way for my industry or my field to contribute in alleviating that.

When I conducted research, I felt like that played a huge motivator for me. It was a massive role, because I wasn’t just doing it for myself in a way. Even today, I still consider that as my main motivator when I’m going out and applying for things. I think taking myself out of the equation and seeing what is the best way that I can, you know, impact the world has helped me so much.

And as I’ve been looking at these newer construction methods, like 3D printable concrete and topology optimization, they all revolve around reducing the cost to labor, materials, and just overall construction timelines—even design clients. So I felt like it was a great opportunity for me, for these newer technologies to help with the cases where budgets are truly constrained. In a real world where, for example, low income housing comes with only a small budget, you really want to maximize your efficiency to the greatest extent possible.

And I feel like computer technology is definitely going to be the road to get there. I would recommend anyone who’s trying to pursue engineering to also try to take classes like that that will give you these unique perspectives about how you may want to impact the world and make it a better place.

Laura Vogt
So there you have it. Civil engineering is part of so many aspects of our lives. This podcast only covers a small portion of what you can do with a degree, and I hope this introduction has given you a place to start with your research into the subject.

Have you checked out our podcast webpage, engineering.berkeley.edu/exploringengineering? It has links to resources like our acronym lists and videos produced by Girls in Engineering that are introductions to engineering majors and topics.

Share this podcast series with your friends, classmates, and schools so others can learn and explore what being an engineer means.