r/StructuralEngineering

Structural engineer here —

I have gone from doing task and projects that are repetitive to just doing them once, understanding the workflow, resources and deliverables. Then just giving instructions to AI with pertinent folders, example files, standard resources and its capable of basically doing everything.

Even in cad design software, once you do a model by yourself and teach ai. You can describe the task and let ai do it itself, I suggest for this to break it down in to blocks to supervise it better. The more repetition, the better pattern recognition it will have.

This is great where you work in industries that have clear governing standards and rules. Once you feed the correct information. The sky is literally the limit.

It literally cuts 3 hour tasks to 30 minutes its insane.

Hi all,

Just after some additional perspective here. Ive recently started as a design engineer in Brisbane about 2 months ago, coming out of a Forensic role with less design experience. When I first started, I got given a project to work on and a senior engineer to help guide me through.

Once the initial designs of that project were complete, I went nearly a whole week without anything to do. I eventually reached out to the director and asked if there are any other projects I can assist on. Following that, I got given another one to do and worked through that.

Fast-forwarding to today, I am in a similar situation with little bits a pieces to attend to here and there on these ongoing projects.

But I am wondering if this is normal to have such little stuff to do? I dont feel particularly good showing up at work and waiting for something to pop up for me to be busy.

Genuinely curious to hear some outsiders perspective on this.

Hello, I am currently doing an internship in a structural engineering firm (~20 people) in Berlin. The internship (6 months) is a mandatory part of my Bachelor’s degree at a German university of applied sciences (5th semester).

The first month has passed and I am currently battling my doubts and fears about the job as a structural engineer. At uni I was always interested in the structural courses and thought the job as a structural engineer would fit perfectly - the idea of working on a project, calculating statics (which I love in uni) every day and one day seeing it constructed in reality sounded amazing.

Even though I am not really doing many calculations for my firm (most tasks are annoying archive work and filling out financial excel sheets but that’s another topic), I realized that I don’t know ANYTHING yet. I knew that I’ve only been in uni for 2 years but I underestimated how much my lack of actual experience weighs.

And together with this humbling realization I started worrying: Being a structural engineer comes with a lot of responsibility - one day I will have to make sure that the building stands safely, right? Together with pressure from deadlines and so on I imagine that I would be very worried about making mistakes that could endanger somebody and then having to live with that…

So now to my questions:

Do you have those worries?
Did they change over time at all?
How do you manage them?
What can/should be done to try and avoid crucial mistakes?

It makes sense to mention that I am someone who is very good at worrying. I have had a couple of phases in my life where worries/fears hindered my daily life. That is why I recently began working on this together with a psychologist.

I’m sorry for the long post but thank you for reading and I would love to hear from some of you.
Thanks

Hey, has anyone seen this error? (screenshot attached)

The model was running fine, then I added a few Load Patterns to the same Load Case and now I get "Error in performing miRunAnalysis" when I try to run it.

Not sure what's causing it. Any ideas or a fix without rebuilding the whole case?

Using ETABS 23.

https://preview.redd.it/imdxoqhtabth1.png?width=271&format=png&auto=webp&s=6aef8e602f7b3f1526fcdcc7e8f1f1bde28df640

Thanks!

I am thinking about taking one the online courses to prepare for the PE Civil Structural Exam. Not sure which one but maybe SoPE or AEI. Do any of the courses provide the code books to reference? I have a hard copy of the Steel manual and pdf versions of the IBC, ACI, and ASCE 7 manuals but don’t have any of the others.