One of the biggest lessons I learned that they don't teach you in school is do not be afraid to be conservative if it allows you to consolidate member sizes. If you can choose a few member sizes to support an entire floor rather than 20 different member sizes, no one is going to care if some of those beams are oversized.
And here I am, a 2nd year irregular BSCE Major in Structural Engineering student who is currently retaking Integral Calculus which is the fundamental prerequisite to Statics, Dynamics, and Mechanics. It's gonna be a fun few years :)
Relying solely on CAD software is so dangerous, because they have weaknesses hidden in the programming assumptions that are not yet exposed. There are also innumerable Code requirements and Table entries that do not express the reasons, written in blood, that have led to their existance.
Is this the practice in work? I'm yet to experience working in design firms. Aren't they cross checking it with manual tabulation using excel? (beam/column sizes and their connections)?
Paranoia is the preferable mindset where your worst decisions will risk lives decades into the future. Take an interest in learning about engineering disasters, of shortcuts often taken by contractors and the building trades, of weakened regulations that are likely the result of political bribery, not enlightenment.
Enjoy this awesome degree. Don't get too stressed and try to enjoy the journey. This kind of degree (engineering) can get really really tough and if you forget why you are doing it or if you get to stressed about the GPA you can have a really bad time. And by this I don't mean that you don't have to work hard. In fact, I think you really have to not just pass exams, but you need to fix that knowledge in your brain. And that is very difficult since civil engineering is a very extense degree with many different areas and you probably will cover all your knowledge in water treatment plants (for example) in 4 months; after that you won't see that again and in the real life they will expect you to know something about that and you need to remember.
Did you know that in California making new states laws for climate change like cities and/or counties allow make climate resilience districts use any funds(taxes, grants) for improving any eligible projects that have high risk of wildfire, Flooding, sea level rise, extreme heat or cold, etc ( ca laws bill SB- 852- Dodd). For California state department of transportation have to improve highway systems for wildlife animals( ca laws bill AB- 2344 - Friedman and Kalra). Housing zoning will keep changing because climate change by state mandated local program( ca laws bill AB-1445- Levine).
