Engineer Your Success
I will be teaching the review classes for the structural portion of the Civil PE exam in April for PPI. Classes for the entire course start on January 13th so sign up soon if you are interested. Even if you are not taking this particular review class, I highly suggest you look into taking a review class because it’s a great way to reinforce what you already know and a short cut for you to learn about materials that could be on the exam.
We all study differently, but there’s one critical study task everyone must do before either the PE or SE exam. You will be happy that you completed it before the actual exam because you will learn a lot from it and you will vastly increase your chance of passing the test.
Continue reading “1 “Must Do” Item Before Taking the PE (any of them!) or SE Exam”
Before taking the SE exam, I thought that the Vertical Forces component of the SE exam was going to be the easier portion of the two. I wasn’t planning to devote a lot of time to study for it but that all changed after I spoke with a few of my friends who recently took the SE exam. They all told me that to their surprise they thought the vertical portion of the test was harder and that I need to take the vertical portion more seriously. After I took the SE exam, I was very glad that I heeded their warnings and prepared for it the right way. In this post I will explain how I prepared for the vertical portion of the SE exam and hopefully save you a lot of studying time!
Continue reading “How I Passed the SE Vertical Exam (and you can too!)”
Learning how to efficiently use the Steel Manual (AISC Steel Construction Manual) is very important in steel design. Below are some helpful AISC tables/sections to know for the PE/SE exam, college exams, or everyday engineering practice.
Continue reading “Steel Manual: Useful Tables and Concepts to Know”
I will be teaching a review class for the SE exam in October for PPI starting this summer. Click here to check out the course outline and sign up! The topics that I will teach include steel, wood, masonry, and seismic.
I look forward to having you in my class!
College career fair is an on campus meet and greet between potential employees (students) and potential employers (companies and government agencies). Your school is likely to have multiple career fairs at different time during the year (i.e. fall, winter, spring) and there might even be an engineering specific career fair. My advice is to go to the engineering career fair for sure, but make sure you also look up the list of companies at the general career fairs (should be on the career center website) to see if there are engineering companies in the general career fairs that you can go meet with as well. It’s easy to write off going to the career fair as a waste of time, but I will tell you this: I have gotten both an internship and job offers from the career fairs that I have attended. Although there are definitely some companies that go to career fairs to promote themselves rather than do any serious hiring, I have been part of company recruiting teams that go to the college career fairs to really find candidates to hire. Since I have been on both sides (being both a company’s representative and a student) at many career fairs, here are 6 do’s and don’t that you should know to be effective at these events.
As a building engineer, it has never made sense to me why the SE exam requires so much bridge knowledge (wouldn’t it make more sense to have a Building SE license and a Bridge SE license?). Thankfully, building engineers will only need to know the bridge questions for the morning section of the exam. From personal experience and what I hear from others, there are definitely enough bridge questions on the test that you will need to get at least some of them right to have a chance of passing the exam. Some of these bridge questions will require an in depth understanding of the subject, but there are also plenty of bridge questions you can get right by knowing and understanding some relatively simple bridge concepts. The goal of this post is to position you to at least get a good shot at getting the simple bridge questions right.
Continue reading “4 Steps to Prepare for the SE Exam Bridge Section as a Building Engineer”
It’s difficult start thinking about life after college, but now is the time to start your job search. I’m sure your classmates are already knee deep in the process, so it’s time for you to do it too. Here are 6 resources to help you to find your first full-time engineering job. These resources are also available for recent graduates who are still looking for work. Continue reading “Job Hunt: Are You Ready?”
OK, so you hear about an EIT or FE exam, but you don’t know much about it. Well, you are in luck! I have summarized below everything you ever want to know about this test.
What is the EIT/FE exam?
The Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam, also known as Engineer-In-Training (EIT) exam, is the first step in the journey to obtain your Professional Engineering (PE) license. The test is designed for recent college graduates or students who are close to finishing an under graduate engineering degree from an EAC/ABET-accredited program. The first paper-based FE exam was administered by National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES) in 1965 and transitioned to a computer-based exam in 2014. The test contains 110 multiple-choice questions and lasts around 6 hours.
Continue reading “EIT/FE Exam: Everything You Ever Want to Know About It”
