Professional day for students of civil engineering

The largest independent and professional circle for students at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Budapest University of Technology is the BME Zielinski Szilárd College of Civil Engineering. Its students have just participated in an exciting professional visit to the STUDIO IN-EX general design office. The aim of the event was to give the students an insight into the workings of a leading civil engineering and design office and to learn about the options they have when pursuing their career in engineering.

The programme started with a brief tour of the office and its operations, during which Andrea Bányász and Zsolt Oláh showed the students around. The students were introduced to the organisational structure of STUDIO IN-EX and how professionals from different fields work together. Andrea Bányász then gave a detailed presentation of the company’s operations, describing the studios, the positions and the projects conducted by the company. The students were given an insight into the wide range of tasks that designers and engineers face in their daily work.

In his presentation, Gábor Pljesovszki introduced the participants to the world of structural engineering and BIM (Building Information Modelling). Students were shown how digital design can make structural calculations and construction processes more efficient.

Zsolt Oláh, head of the BIM studio, said that the work of a BIM expert is not only related to models and clash detection, but can also be remarkably diverse, specialising in CDE, software development or consultancy (software selection, implementation, consultancy, training).

The series of professional presentations was continued by Nikolett Pekola-Molnár, who spoke about the importance of project management, effective work organisation and the various project coordination challenges. Tamás Déri then presented the role of software development in civil engineering design. It was exciting for the students to see how the development of digital tools and automation is creating new opportunities in engineering.

Zsolt Oláh concluded by explaining that it can be difficult to decide whether to go into design, construction or to take up a different position (as operator, project manager, distributor, BIM expert, etc.) as a civil engineer, but the possibility to switch later on is there. Nowadays in the construction industry, there is a lot of specialising, and within these main strands you can still go in quite different directions, which will evolve over time depending on your interests. We have tried to organise the lectures accordingly, so that students can gain insight into as many areas as possible.

We hope that the visit was inspiring for the participants and helped them in their career choices. STUDIO IN-EX will continue to be open to this kind of professional programme, as supporting and inspiring the engineers of tomorrow is in our common interest.