 So why should you come and take civil and environmental engineering? Well, let me introduce you to a couple of Latin terms. The first term, schiere, you'll recognize as being the basis for the word science, means to know in Latin. And the second word, ingenere, basis for the word engineering, means to create. So have you ever been in a math class or a science class and you're looking at something and studying it very carefully and you're wondering, well, how do I go about applying this? What am I going to be able to do with this piece of information beyond the questions that are being asked in my science class? Or on the other side, perhaps you've been playing around with something. You're a creator. You like to build something. You've made something out of Legos or some sort of toy or you've built something in a shop. And as you're creating it, it behaves in a way that's a little strange or you're not exactly certain why it works, but you know it works. Well, what we want to do in a class as engineers is learn how to put together, combine what you know with how you create. And so you can create in a fashion that actually predicts and controls the future, controls the behavior of whatever it is you create. What I try to do in my class is give you that first moment where you create something for the first time but you've made a relatively complex prediction about what that something is going to do. And then when it really does what you've created it to do, then you know you have control and you truly are an engineer. Now this course is civil and environmental engineering. Civil engineering basically referring to people, a citizen. An environmental engineering and viral means in a circle everything around us as people, as citizens. So in civil environmental engineering we're going to split the class into two parts and talk, first of all, about things that we need as people. Basically buildings, we'll talk a lot about structures and how we determine whether a structure is going to stand up or whether it's going to fall down and how we analyze that. We can build it, we can test it, we can guess. But guessing is not going to be good enough if you want to build something that's going to stand up for many years and also use a realistic amount of materials. Now on the other side of things, the environment around us there are many things that affect the environment around us water, air, things like that. Well we're interested in looking how those behave and how we interact with them, how we change them and how they change us. And again we need to learn some of the details about those things in order to make good predictions and ultimately to build things that fit our purposes. So would you like to be an engineer? Well it takes about 10,000 hours to become an expert at something or so they say. We're not going to become complete experts but why don't you start with the first 200 hours in my class and let's see where we go.