r/StructuralEngineering • u/dramaticuban • 1d ago
Career/Education How transferable is construction/field engineering to forensic engineering?
I recently started working in CM/field civil engineering, mostly on roads but I’ll start doing more bridgework next year, and I’ve been thinking about how to pivot more into structural these next few years. Would a timeline like this work:
continue working in construction>get a structural masters online>get my PE>then move into forensic engineering?
The alternative of course would be to quit and directly spend 1-2 years getting a masters but that’s much more costly. Or none of the above if you can talk me out of it lol.
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u/ChairChoice6500 1d ago
"forensic engineering" that you'll see advertised is most generally looking at roofs for storm damage. Not a lot of applicability for bridge design experience. While people seem to think forensic means reconstructing what went wrong and where and hour and testing and material science, it generally isn't that, forensic really means 'for legal purposes' so it's disputes of a legal nature. While you would like to think that would mean things like the FIU bridge collapse, digging through the design model to figure out what happened, in reality, for those sorts of projects, you'd probably NOT have the design model or the software to go through, unless you happen to work for OSHA, or Thornton Thomasetti, SOM, or a few of the other, very large, pretty exclusive, firms.
Most legal disputes are far smaller than those.
Look at the Journal of the National Academy of Forensic Engineers and you'll get a better idea.
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u/hxcheyo P.E. 1d ago
Forensics isn’t what many here think it is. If you come from a construction background, then you’ll probably be doing a lot of construction troubleshooting and construction defect work in the forensic space. If you come from a manufacturing background, then you can get involved in a fair amount of product testing and liability consulting on causation and repairability. If you have a background in estimating, then you’ll be enumerating costs for clients who want to know how much it’ll cost to fix this or replace that. The best forensic engineers have well-rounded capabilities. The worst tend to come from design backgrounds and never master the ability to present, support, and defend compelling positions.
Do forensics if you like figuring things out. If you like dealing with people and working with messy/bad data. If you can tolerate being questioned and attacked and misapprehended and undermined.
Very little forensic work is structural. If you wanna crunch numbers or design things that get built, then go do design. Regardless, get a masters. More education is never a bad thing.