To be a Transportation Engineer or Not?

The transportation industry faces a growing shortage of professional engineers. A key strategy in solving this problem will be to encourage more civil engineering students to specialize in transportation while completing their undergraduate degree so that employers have a larger pool of likely recruits. This paper examines the factors that lead civil engineering undergraduates to specialize in transportation, as opposed to other civil engineering subdisciplines. The primary method used was a web-based survey of 1,852 civil engineering undergraduates. The study results suggest steps the transportation community can take to increase the number of civil engineering undergraduates who choose to specialize in transportation. Educators need to introduce material into required freshman and sophomore courses that shows the range of dynamic career possibilities available in the transportation field, and employers need to increase and better publicize transportation internships.

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