How civil and structural engineering relate, the sub-disciplines within civil engineering, the project lifecycle from raw land to occupied building, the codes and standards landscape this program uses throughout, and a roadmap of how this 21-item program is organized.
Civil engineering governs a project's relationship to the land and water around it — siting, grading, drainage, utilities — while structural engineering, a specialized sub-discipline within it, is responsible for the skeleton that carries every load safely to the ground. This module builds the mental model the rest of the program assumes: how civil sub-disciplines like geotechnical, structural, transportation, and water resources engineering relate to each other, how a project actually moves from planning through permitting, design, construction, and inspection, and how the IBC, ASCE 7, ACI 318, and AISC 360 fit together as a layered codes landscape rather than one document.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain exactly where civil site work hands off to structural design at a building's foundation — and why that hand-off, if not actively coordinated, is one of the most common sources of real field conflicts on a project.