It usually will be necessary to spend at least one academic year pursuing the master's degree, although a student may spend a year and a half or even two years in master's studies if any deficiencies in the undergraduate curriculum must be made up.
If you were to look at the records of most Ph.D. candidates in engineering schools in the United States you would see that they usually rank in the upper five or ten percent of their undergraduate classes. Rarely will a person pursue doctoral degree studies successfully if he or she has ranked below the upper one fourth of the undergraduate class. Usually a doctoral degree will require a minimum of three years of study after the bachelor's degree. In many cases the time necessary to complete the Ph.D. is longer than this and may be as much as four to six years. One of the reasons doctoral candidates take longer to finish their studies is that usually these students work part-time as teaching assistants or research assistants. The usual engineering doctoral degree is the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), although some schools offer the Doctor of Engineering (D.Engr.), Doctor of Engineering Science (D.Engr.Sc), or the Doctor of Science degree (Sc.D.). When you consider graduate studies in civil engineering, you should obtain the bulletins for the graduate schools at the universities in which you are interested and obtain specific details on those graduate programs from those sources.
Over the years, there have been different approaches to the education of an engineer. In some societies the educational process for an engineer basically was that of an apprentice who worked under a master engineer in the field and gradually became accepted by the members of the profession after a sufficiently long period of time. In other countries, formal education in engineering schools was required and no emphasis was placed on practical experience. Today in the United States at a number of universities, programs of study have been established which represent a compromise between these two philosophies of engineering education. At these institutions, students are able to obtain practical engineering experience at the same time they are completing their academic requirements. These programs are known as Cooperative Work Programs. The administrations of these schools work closely with industries and governmental agencies to establish jobs in which the engineering student can gain experience in a meaningful way. Cooperative Work Programs offer the student several advantages, the most important of which is the opportunity to take a realistic look at the world of engineering practice. Such experience will allow the student to evaluate the long-term opportunities for work in the engineering profession and to compare the type of work available to the type of work in which he or she is most interested. The student acts as an intern and works with practicing engineers on real problems. This experience also can show the student the variety of specializations available within the broad spectrum of civil engineering. This experience in actual engineering work also is valuable in indicating to the student her or his own capabilities and limitations. The experience of working with practicing engineers on real problems also makes the student's continuing course work more meaningful. When the student graduates, the cooperative work experience makes her or him a more valuable employee, and allows the graduate to command a higher starting salary. Finally, the most obvious advantage of the cooperative work experience is the salary which the student earns on the job; for many students, these cooperative work salaries are the primary means of paying for the cost of their education.
There are essentially two choices among academic programs which include a cooperative work experience: in some programs, the cooperative internship is compulsory and is a requirement for obtaining the engineering degree for all students; in the other programs, co-op is optional and is sometimes available only to the better student. In all cooperative work programs, the overall course of studies necessarily is made longer and, usually, at least five years are required to obtain a bachelor's degree.
