When I made this website back in January, I told myself I would keep updating this website few times every month. It’s pretty evident that was not to be. I don’t usually make excuses but there’s good reasons for my absence.
First of all, I’m quite happy to have passed the national Professional Engineering (PE) exam this past April. It’s offered twice a year by NCEES and it is the first step to becoming a license engineer in the US. In other states, I would have already become a licensed engineer. But California is more stringent and I have to go through two more 3-hour exams; one related to seismic design, and another related to surveying.
This is probably one of the more grueling exams I’ve ever been through. It’s not hard, just extremely very long. The whole exam is split into two portions, each lasting 4 hours for a total of 8 hours. You are essentially grinding through questions from 8 AM to 6 PM. Near the end of the exam, I was so over it both mentally and physically.
The first half of the exam is the breadth section, which tests your knowledge on literally everything you learned back in college. I use the word “literally” with the correct dictionary definition. The breadth section covers everything from Bernoulli’s principle, to open-channel flow, to traffic models, to engineering economics. The scope is every civil engineering related course you have taken in college. Luckily the questions are quite straight forward, and it is open-book…
The second half of the exam is the depth section, where you get tested on a more specific branch of civil engineering; structural engineering in my case. I thought this section was pretty easy since I do this stuff at work pretty much every day.
I’m glad I passed. Hoping to write more in the future.