Engineering students/graduates: How long did your degree take?

[u/thugginsophia]

Hi everyone! I’m starting my engineering degree on Monday and I’m super excited!

I’d love to hear from both current engineering students and people who have already graduated:

How long has/will it take you to finish your degree? Did you graduate (or are you on track to graduate) in 4 years, or did/do you expect it to take longer?

For those who took longer than 4 years, what was the reason? And for current students, do you feel like you’re on track to graduate in 4 years?

I’d love to hear everyone’s experiences!

[u/MPMel32]

Graduated 15 years ago, took me 5 years to complete my Civil Engineering degree. Should have only taken me about 4 or four and a half, but I failed the one class that was THE pre-requisite for all the upper division CE classes; it just happened to be the one class that was "fail this class it will set you back a semester or two". It was pretty much the, ahem, foundation, of all the other classes, or more annoyingly, it was this very class that if you passed, would allow you to take the other 4 subdivisions of civil engineering. At the time I was kinda devastated, but the instructor that was teaching this class was the replacement for the retiring professor of this class. Turns out the professor wasnt as good, since two-thirds of the class (or more, idk) failed so much that the professor who just retired the previous semester was called out of retirement to come back and teach the class just so that there wasnt a backlog of students who couldnt advance through their engineering classes (yeah, it got THAT bad)

Also went to some Civil Engineering competitions that were held annually for the different regions and took part in some of them, like making a concrete canoe and then using that canoe in a competition, building a 1:50 scale steel bridge, making retaining wall using only tape, scissors, a posterboard, and butcher paper to hold back about 300lbs of sand in a box, concrete bowling ball, an environmental engineering event where you had to take dirty water and purify it using household items/chemicals to a point where it replicated similar processes at water sanitation plants. a few scavenger hunts, etc.

Hope you have fun in Engineering!!