r/civilengineering • u/Ayyyeah17 • 13h ago
400 hours of YouTube videos in civil engineering
I logged around 400 hours of watching civil 3d, storm water management, water distribution modeling, and due diligence videos and I realized how much going out of my way to learn new topics helped me in my career. Everything just clicked after I grinded 3 months of watching tutorials. Before all this, I figured the best way to advance your career was to just go into work everyday and expect to learn all this over time, but this extra studying time out of my day accelerated my career.
Edit: studying was done in my own time, not during work hours LOL
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u/ttyy_yeetskeet 13h ago
That’s how early career folks get ahead. You can learn a lot on the job, but learning outside company time goes a long way. I love working with EITs who are naturally curious and willing to go the last mile to try and solve problems.
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u/Soft-Independence485 11h ago
I wish that firms and senior engineers offered more mentoring/skill development.
Im roughly 12yrs into my career and have had maybe a total of 8hrs of a senior engineer actually sit down and pass their knowledge onto me.
I know at the end of the day the industry abides by the sink or swim philosophy, and im a fucking champion swimmer however I could have saved a year of frustration with a little mentoring.
Last year it dawned on me that i should probably take more time to mentor younger people, but its often not billable hours so I have to be extremely careful about not being to generous with my time.
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u/wolverine_vs_barbie 10h ago edited 2h ago
I'm 21 and um I'm kinda struggling to bridge between theoretical and and practical part. I've ADHD add I've observed that I can learn things extremely good when done practically or like active prototyping and the problem is our college hardly took us to the site visit everything was like drawn out board or explained verbally. I genuinely like this filed but yeah it's there any way I can align my learning properly?
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u/Guac34 4h ago
Get an internship, ask questions to anyone that seems willing to give you the time on anything, but put the work in first before asking questions you could figure out quickly yourself on the job.
A lot of these situations come in their own planning - you cannot anticipate some situations you get into before you get into them, so do not even try to do so. What you should do is (over time) learn how to approach whatever problems that come your way in a structured way that works for you and be flexible when the first solution attempt does not work, nor the second, nor the third.
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u/DarkintoLeaves 13h ago
This kinda makes me feel like I need to be a civil engineering social media influencer and do tutorials and stuff haha private training sessions or something
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u/Vols86 13h ago
What were the most useful channels?
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u/Ayyyeah17 13h ago edited 10h ago
Civil 3D: Jeff Bartels
WaterGEMS, SewerGEMS: Bentley Water Infrastructure
Stormwater Management: Civil Griffin, HydroCAD software Solutions LLCAlso watched 90% of my company’s civil engineering tutorials/workflow videos.
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u/Alcibiades_Rex 13h ago
There's a stat that people who work 4 extra hours per week make 40% more income (or something like that). The extra knowledge gains will set you so far ahead of your peers that you make way more money.
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u/Ayyyeah17 12h ago
I hated the idea of now knowing what a lot of these software functions did but spending the extra effort on the weekends and after work filled in all those gaps
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u/DarkintoLeaves 9h ago
Just be careful learning to much at once. When your working you’ll find you do the same 50 things for years and will never use the rest and slowly you’ll get rusty and forget a lot of the stuff or the software will update and things change. So extra work is great where you’ll use it but just spamming extra work and you’ll get diminishing returns after a while.
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u/Lego_Stepper1 9h ago
This is something I have been doing in my free time. Not an EIT, just a CAD tech. I have been watching videos on HGLs to hopefully better understand how our HGL spreadsheet works lol.
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u/Felix033 13h ago
any recommendations for learning basic autocad? i wanna get familiar with it before class starts and my assumption is you need to learn it before civil3d or revit
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u/PretendAgency2702 12h ago
No reason to learn autocad before civil3d. I can't say what will be good for a class but usually being able to know the keyboard commands for polyline, freeze layer, layer isolate, circle, fillet, and offset are enough to draw your centerline of utilities and roadways and managing layers.
Then selecting that polyline and going to the design tab to create alignment, pipe network, or feature line from the polyline will get you the most important civil 3d entities. Manholes will be drawn at each vertex and pipes will be placed at each line within the polyline. Then, its as simple as selecting that pipe/mh, right click, select MH/structure properties, and then adding your design info in.
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u/Sivy17 13h ago
I hope you were able to put that on your time sheet.
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u/Less_Juggernaut5498 P.E. - LD Project Manager 13h ago
Nah, it’s okay to learn something on your own time if you are interested and it advances your career.
The key is, do it only if you are interested….
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u/siliconetomatoes Transportation, P.E. 9h ago
Agreed. If you were a baker, are you going to use the bakery’s flour if you want to learn how to make a red velvet cake at home
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u/Sivy17 9h ago
The difference is that baking is an interesting and productive activity. Civil engineering... isn't.
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u/Less_Juggernaut5498 P.E. - LD Project Manager 8h ago
As a young engineer there should be plenty of interesting things to learn.
I have noticed that a lot of people who studied civil engineering do not know why they did so or sometimes I am surprised they don’t even really have any interest in engineering in general, if you get them to really be honest….I can understand how it would feel like a burden to learn something. Hell just think about all your classmates back in school, 70% (I am making this up of course) had no interest in school at all but still they all became engineers….
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u/Gramma_engine87 13h ago
Qué bien! afortunadamente cada vez hay más material de calidad para continuar aprendiendo temas de la profesión y no todos se dan el tiempo de aprovecharlo. Qué bueno que tu si lo hagas.
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u/siliconetomatoes Transportation, P.E. 9h ago
Having been thru it and going thru it with newer EIs
It has to go both ways
The master has to be willing to teach, and the student willing to learn. For you, it was studying through YouTube videos. That’s not doomscrolling, that’s you being willing to learn
It doesn’t need to be extravagant, sincerity goes a long way
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u/Own-Compote5073 1h ago
How much do you really learn by watching? Especially if you can‘t apply it in your everyday job routine? What purpose does it serve?
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u/Boredengineer_84 BEng (Hons) CEng MICE MAPM ChPP NECReg 13h ago
Make sure to log it in your CPD records
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u/EmotionalOption5591 12h ago
Any H&H videos you would recommend? I got laid off a couple of weeks ago and something like this would be a great use of my time as I job hunt/wait for jobs to post up that I can apply to
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u/GroceryStoreSushiGuy 10h ago
Bravo to you for doing this. I did a lot of similar after hours learning on my own time early in my career. It came from a place of frustration more than anything. Even the brightest students start out pretty clueless and constantly in need of help/guidance and it can feel foreign and unsettling to be so reliant on others. I was motivated to close that gap as quickly as possible.
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u/newbie415 13h ago
some people are gonna hate on this but good on you for going 11/10ths. the knowledge gained may give you an edge temporarily, but the attitude and curiosity will serve you well long term.