By Neda Oreizy

Take your EIT exam during your junior or senior year when you’ll remember the material. Get an internship for the summer after you graduate and then get your master’s degree. This is some of the advice alumni gave structural engineering students at the Structural Engineering Alumni Mixer, which was one of the events to kick off Structural Engineering Week at UCSD.

The networking event included a presentation by Dr. Frieder Seible, the dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering and founder of the Structural Engineering Department, on UCSD’s contribution to the new San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge. The second annual Structural Engineering Job Fair was earlier that day, and included over 30 companies and their UCSD alums. Concluding the week was the UCSD Society of Civil and Structural Engineers-hosted Pacific Southwest Regional Student Conference, which ran from April 12 through 14, and included competitions such as the steel bridge, concrete canoe and seismic design.

Throughout the day, students passed out resumes and contemplated their futures, especially since it’s a critical time to make the right decisions, according to Jeffrey MacNaster, ’07. MacNaster spoke with Mahmoud Faghihi, ’04, and Claire Massie, ’03, about classes, the industry, work load and certification exams, and got some surprising answers. Not only does Faghihi regularly work on eight projects at a time, sometimes confusing materials like concrete and steel, but he almost never does the same thing twice—making every undergraduate course relevant. As for the PE exam, Massie agrees that it’s not exactly relevant to what engineers encounter on a day-to-day basis.

And the highlight of the evening? According to one student, “We’re congregating around the food, because frankly, we never see it.” Sarah Means, ’03, on the other hand, came to hear the Dr. Seible, a former professor of hers, detail UCSD’s involvement in the $5 billion San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge project and the efforts made to account for the San Andreas and Hayward fault lines.

Philip Yu, ’06 and the Structural Engineering Group Steering Committee Chair, organized the day’s activities and has high hopes for its impact. “We’re creating the network ourselves — making the world a better place,” Yu says.