In general, engineering courses don’t dominate your course load until the latter half of your college experience. You’re first two years are most focused on acclimating to the college experience and USC campus, with more GEs and pre-requisites filling up your class schedule. Now as a junior, almost my entire schedule is filled with civil engineering classes, such as Structural Design or Computational Methods in Civil Engineering.
While it is definitely a larger work load and requires more thought, you start getting more specific and practical experience in the civil engineering field. For example, the freshman physic classes would teach you about gravity or normal forces on a box just sitting on the ground. Now in structural design you use calculations and software to ensure the structure of a building can withstand those gravity and normal forces and stay up. It is important to stay on top of these classes because if you wish to pursue a career in structural engineering, these will define the work you do.
It is also incredible how experience evolves your own thought on the build environment. I never really look at a skyscraper anymore as just purely a building, I see beams and columns, a floor slab, and façade that all collaborate and fit together like a puzzle to make that skyscraper stand hundreds of feet in the air. And it is this feeling and intrigue, figuring out how it is put together, and reminds me why I wanted to be a civil engineer in the first place.
