Hello everyone,
I graduated with a degree in civil engineering. Over the past 10 years, I have spent approximately 3 years working on the design of reinforced concrete buildings and the last 4 years evaluating and strengthening the seismic performance of existing buildings. I am still working in this field.
I don’t consider the previous 3 years of design experience very productive, as I was a novice and used a local program that automatically performed all calculations and provided direct drawings. I feel this has dulled my engineering skills and deteriorated my theoretical knowledge. In the past 4 years, I have been using the SAP2000 program, and since starting this job, I feel I have gained a lot. Additionally, I completed my master’s degree in earthquake engineering during this time.
However, recently I have been feeling very inadequate and uninformed professionally. When I was providing information to an intern about reinforced concrete structure design and evaluating existing buildings, I noticed many gaps in my knowledge. I found that I couldn’t explain some concepts well, got stuck on certain topics, and couldn’t comment on things at the required level as an engineer. This has caused me some panic because I realized that I don’t clearly understand even fundamental concepts and that I might be doing some things by rote rather than truly grasping the logic.
For example, when trying to design a reinforced concrete shear wall and moment-resisting frame building, I couldn’t determine the shear wall reinforcement using manual calculations based on the moments and shear forces obtained from SAP2000. I also struggled with how to distribute the longitudinal reinforcement in a column. SAP2000 provides the total area of longitudinal reinforcement for a section, but I wasn’t sure how to distribute it within the section—whether to distribute it evenly or vary it based on the direction of the moment.
This is just one simple example that comes to mind. I feel like I need to start from the basics of strength of materials and review all topics, but this would require a significant amount of time, which I don’t have. There are so many topics to cover. I’m not sure what to do. I feel like a useless and poor engineer and am losing my motivation to work.
Have any of you experienced similar feelings? What would you recommend I do at this point? Where should I start my studies? Thank you.