Civil Engineering Master's Program Online

Master’s in Civil Engineering Program Overview

The Master of Civil Engineering is designed to empower professionals with the cutting-edge knowledge and skills needed to shape the future of our built environment. With the everchanging structural landscape we now live in—our cities are growing, infrastructure is aging, and environmental and social challenges are evolving—we need exceptional engineers to meet these challenge with transformative skills. Our master’s program equips engineers with the advanced knowledge to design, build, and maintain critical structures and infrastructure systems that sustain our world.

With a diverse array of graduate courses, you can specialize in a number of areas within civil engineering or customize a broader curriculum that aligns with your unique career goals. Designed for flexibility, courses are delivered online, in either synchronous or asynchronous formats, with select in-person offerings on the Homewood Campus—ensuring that wherever you are, you can advance your expertise and make a positive impact.

As a student, you will gain a firm understanding of how to:

• Apply mathematics, science, and engineering principles to a variety of civil engineering situations.
• Identify, formulate, and solve complex problems in civil engineering.
• Use the techniques, skills, and modern tools necessary for engineering practice.

Civil Engineering Master’s Focus Areas

A focus area can be selected but is not required. Your focus area will not appear on your diploma but will provide a tailored education for students looking to specialize in a specific field. 

• Geotechnical Engineering: Elevate your expertise in the mechanics of subterranean materials (soils, rocks, etc.) to ensure structures and infrastructure systems are supported by safe, stable foundations. This focus area will provide deeper knowledge into skills geotechnical engineers need to analyze and design tunnels, retaining walls, slopes, dams, and embankments for all manner of load conditions, and consider failures unique to geotechnical engineering such as landslides and soil settlements.
• Natural Hazards Resilience Design: Understanding how to design for and mitigate the impacts of natural hazards is becoming increasingly important for any professional maintaining or designing the structures and infrastructure systems critical to society. This focus area provides instruction in fundamentals related to earthquakes, wind events, structural fires, and sea level rise.
• Ocean and Coastal Engineering: Take advanced courses to learn new ways to address challenges that impact our coastlines, waterways, and marine infrastructure, including ports, harbors, breakwaters, seawalls, as well as offshore platforms and renewable energy systems. With expertise in hydrodynamics, coastal processes, and structural engineering, you can heighten the skills necessary to design and implement solutions that mitigate the impacts of erosion, sea-level rise, hurricanes, and other coastal hazards, ensuring that coastal communities and marine structures remain resilient in the face of changing environmental conditions.
• Preservation Engineering: Coursework focuses on developing stronger skills to assess existing structures and develop plans for their rehabilitation, restoration, or adaptive reuse. Much of our existing building stock was constructed using archaic building materials and design codes. Preservation Engineering courses explore those materials and codes, as well as the methods used by professional engineers working on these unique structures.
• Structural Engineering: As a structural engineer, you design, build, and maintain the structures that society relies on to provide shelter, enable transportation, distribute energy, and to treat and move water and wastewater. This focus area builds on that knowledge. Rather than teaching students to design any one type of structure, you will engage in broad instruction in the analysis and design of structures created using various materials and structural forms, and under the action of vertical and lateral loads.
• Civil Engineering: Take the broad set of skills as a civil engineer to design, build, and maintain the essential infrastructure that supports our modern civilization to the next level. With an expertise that spans structural integrity, environmental sustainability, geotechnical analysis, transportation systems, water resource management, and beyond, this focus area is designed for the generalist, the civil engineer whose work requires a broad set of skills, and therefore, allows students to maximize the breadth of coursework in their graduate studies.

FOCUS AREA REQUIREMENTS