The real world of engineering

I happen to attend a friend's birthday picnic where a lot of my high school friends and acquaintances made the majority of the group. Through talking with a few of them, my friend Molly especially, I find I am really not alone when it comes to being disillusioned with the industry for which we are studying. In her case, she gets the concepts of honesty, fairness, accuracy, and integrity of journalism repeated to her, and she sees a lack of it when it comes to examples in real life.

Though I really enjoy learning the concepts of civil engineering (thus far), some of my co-op experiences have left a sour taste in my mouth regarding how the system works in practice. I've seen probably the more dishonest side of engineering consulting, where I've seen the engineers I work with make deals under the table with clients to win a bid, or to avert government fees, or even designing an aspect of a job in which the engineer has absolutely no experience. It just doesn't seem right, nothing stops these people, and their stamp seals the deal. The engineering stamp carries a lot of legal responsibility, meaning that they stake their job on the honest and integrity of the documents stamped. Through very strong objection, I've had major projects sent out to a city for permit where the engineer stamped and signed the drawings without review. Though this was a very unique and extreme situation with this engineer, I still can't believe there are such people practicing and designing infrastructure that society uses.

Another issue I find with engineering in the industry is how lazy everything is. We learn in school about new materials, new ways of approaching design and how they are more thorough than the tried and true methods. I get to my co-ops, and all the jobs involve a copy and paste of specifications, design ideas, or even parts drawn in AutoCAD from previous projects. What's even more interesting is that the projects they are being copied have been submitted, but they are not built yet, meaning that sure the idea passed the review on paper, but they could be perpetuating a bad idea or something the construction guys know from experience that cannot be done or that there's a better way. For example, pipes that would seem to fit in the ceiling together nicely may not jig nicely when it comes to the physical installation due to tolerances in error, which is very common.

This just all makes me want to return to university of grad school or more, because I'm not comfortable with the real world yet, I feel as an undergrad, I wouldn't have the expertise to be able to change it, because that is very much a goal of mine. I don't want the status quo, even if I make a very small bubble of influence around me, I want to know that engineers can be more hard-working than they are and put less emphasis the dollar values of their projects and their wallets at the end of the day.