How Stressful is it to be a Structural Engineer?

My Experience

Hello friends, 👋👋

Today we are taking a break from our engineering mechanics series and talk about an important topic we are dealing with as structural engineers. And that is stress. This is a topic I wanted to talk about for quite some time as I am dealing with it one or the other way every week and because I’ve had a few weeks in the past year when stress influenced my sleep and personal life. This newsletter took me many hours to write and edit, and it’s very personal.

I am gonna share my personal experience working as a structural engineer. But please be aware that everyone handles stress differently, work ethics varies heavily from person to person, and work cultures differ from country to country. So, I might find a situation stressful that you don’t and the other way around. That’s ok.

I want to point out that stress doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. I feel most productive if I have a healthy feeling of time pressure. To me, this means that I am quite busy and might work long hours, but I am optimistic that I will manage to do the job and won’t be overwhelmed.

I’ll be sharing

• Reasons for stress

• Some personal experiences with stress

• And how I am trying to deal with it

This is really an important topic to me, as I am still learning to get better at handling stress. I would love to hear your opinion and experience with it.

Reasons for stress in structural engineering

1. Project-based industry:
   Structural engineering is a project-based industry. This means we have to deliver reports, drawings, and calculations (what we are getting paid for) at an agreed deadline. Often we are working on multiple projects at the same time. Unexpected things can come up which require some of your time, and you often have to answer questions from clients from older projects. All this leads to less time for the project with the deadline. For example, I was working on 6 projects last week, while I had to finish one project until Friday before going on holiday. To satisfy everyone (but also myself) I worked until 10 pm some of the days. 

2. Complexity of structures:
   Structural engineering is difficult. We are working with different materials, new geometries, different disciplines like architecture or MEP, clients and many more factors in every project. There are always unknowns, and these unknowns can turn into problems (or to say it more positively: challenges) very quickly. For example, a very complex geometry might require you to set up a new workflow to calculate the structure. You can’t use your existing spreadsheets, but have to start from scratch. You didn’t calculate for this extra time in your offer, and you run over-budget. 

3. Responsibility:
   Our responsibility is huge in many ways. We must make sure that the structure is safe. We make a mistake and people’s lives are at risk. Mistakes happen, and sometimes you find a mistake late in the design process, which keeps you up at night.

What did I miss? Let us know in the comments below. ✍️✍️

My personal experiences with stress

Here are some of the situations which made me feel stressed:

• Let’s start with the situation I felt most stressed about and how it affected me. A couple of months ago, I did a structural verification and report of an indoor structure for a client. Long story short, the construction company started working even though the design report wasn’t approved by the certified engineer. 2 months into the construction phase, we received the comments from the certified engineer that we forgot to include the internal wind pressure. The moment I saw the comment, I knew that the elements wouldn’t verify for internal wind pressure according to Eurocode. When I did the calcs the utilisation ratio was 900%. The senior engineer I had the project with was on vacation for another 2 weeks, and nobody else in the company had ever verified this type of structure and could tell me what to do. I felt responsible for it and thought it was my mistake. Worst part, the construction company had already been building for 2 months. I read every line of the wind Eurocode 3 times to find a way to reduce the wind load, reached out to the professor for wind at the university I studied and a friend who works with CFD calculations, contacted the manufacturers, and much more. I tried everything I could for 3 days from early morning to late evening. I felt horrible and slept maybe 4 hours a night. So how did it end? Well, after 2-3 days I realised I don’t find a solution and asked for help from a more experienced engineer. He took time to look at the situation, and told me that I shouldn’t worry. He would have done the same, and we found out that it was the client’s responsibility to define the loads. In the end, the client lowered the requirement of the verification and none of the work had to be redone.

• Last week was stressful. I worked on 6 projects. Some of them are my current bigger projects, and 2-3 were about answering questions from clients from past projects. However, you use quickly 1-2 hours recalculating something the client wants to do differently. This also means that you lose focus on the other things you are supposed to do. And for some reason (😁), always something unplanned comes up the days before my vacation that I have to finish before going on vacation. This week it was comments from a certified engineer and the things I should implement didn’t verify. Again, the structure had already been built. To make it verify, I optimized the loads, like reducing the wind loads in this case and a few other things. But it took time to recalculate everything and update the documentation. I was working until 10 pm on Thursday and finished the report on the train to the airport. The stressful part here was that I wasn’t sure if I finish before going on vacation and if I could make the structure verify.

• As I said earlier, I think that there is also good stress. I personally like to be busy. I have to like it 😀😁. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to work on average 45 hours a week in my full-time job and work on this newsletter, the Structural Basics blog and the YouTube channel. I usually work for 2 hours on Structural Basics after work on weekdays and 10 hours on the weekends. And I love it. So for me, if a deadline is coming up and I am working 45-50 hours a week, that’s positive stress (nobody forces me to work overtime, but I want to deliver the project on time).

How I am trying to deal with stress

There are a few things I found in the last years that help me handle work-related and personal stress better:

• Meditation and breathing exercises: For the past 5 years I’ve been meditating for 10 minutes in the morning. This is the first thing I do in the morning when my mind is still “empty”. I close my eyes, sit on the ground, and “watch” my thoughts. After that, I do a breathing exercise for 4 minutes. It really makes me feel calm even in very busy times.

• Sports: I do a lot of sports, and I think it also helps me handle stress better. I usually go to the gym in the morning before work. I am also preparing for a marathon right now, so I am also running 2-3 times a week.

• Flight mode for the first hour: The first hour of the day my phone is in flight mode. That way I can stay calm and focus on my morning routine.

• Sleeping routine: I am trying to always go to bed at the same time and get up at the same time. This is usually 10:30 pm and 5:00 am. During my studies, I struggled to go to bed at the same time because my days looked very different and I often got home from uni quite late. Being in this routine now, I barely have days anymore where I am tired even if I didn’t get enough sleep for one night.

• Diet: You might have already gotten the impression that I am also nerdy about my health. I am constantly trying to improve my well-being and my performance. I have been vegetarian for 5 years, during the week I do intermittent fasting and try to avoid carbs. I feel a lot lighter after eating and I never fall into this post-lunch dip where tiredness hits me.

• Travel: I love traveling. I am traveling almost every time I take days off from work and I think that this is my way of rest and relaxation. Because at home I either work, work out, or meet with friends. I never do anything. But rest is needed sometimes to get new ideas and recharge your energy. I am writing this from Egypt, where I am spending the week relaxing and doing all kinds of sports.

  

  I know that I am very fortunate to be from a country where you earn enough to be able to afford that much travel a year. I am very grateful for this.

These are the things that I think help me handle stress better. What about you? What works well for you?

Conclusion

In my opinion, stress is unavoidable in structural engineering if you want to take on responsibility, and you deeply care about the quality of your work. There will be periods when we might work a bit overtime to complete a task. Over time and with more experience, you get better in handling it. This was my very personal experience with stress. Yours might differ a lot, and I would love to hear your opinion on it.