- School of Engineering
- About Us
For more than 85 years, the Department of Civil Engineering at Santa Clara University has prepared students for a degree in civil engineering. Civil engineers plan, design, build, and maintain the facilities essential to our civilization: bridges, dams, highways, transit systems, airports, tunnels, irrigation systems, water supply, and industrial and commercial buildings. It is one of the most enriching careers open to men and women -- rewarding in personal fulfillment, in enduring service to human-kind, and in financial benefits.
Civil Engineering includes the following subdisciplines: environmental engineering, structural engineering, construction engineering, geotechnical engineering, transportation engineering, and water resources engineering.
The Department of Civil Engineering at SCU recognizes the serious challenges facing human beings in the context of finite nonrenewable resources, climatic changes including global warming, an increasingly multicultural global society, expanding population centers, the need for maintaining the infrastructure, and the responsibility of industrially developed nations to less developed and rapidly developing nations.We believe that these challenges can be met with the direct involvement of civil engineers committed to the fundamental concepts of renewability, sustainability, safety and livability.
Our vision is guided the need to provide innovative and appropriate solutions to these issues through the education of engineers in both the technical and social aspects of engineering, including advanced methods, technologies and policies, and the need for life-long learning.
The Mission of the Department of Civil Engineering is to educate our students to prepare for careers in which they can contribute positively to the design, construction, maintenance and advancement of civil engineering-based systems critical to the quality of life in a changing world.
We do this by providing students with the skills and tools necessary to understand the physical world, to apply this understanding to current and future needs of society and to responsibly and ethically address the impacts that engineered systems can have on a community and its environment. As part of this process, the Department's faculty and students will advance the state of knowledge of the discipline through research, industrial collaboration, publication and relevant service to the profession and community.