 James E. Davis, P.E.
Executive Director
(served through 2002)
American Society of Civil Engineers
Reston, VA
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 B.S. Civil
Engineering, North Carolina State University
M.S. Regional
Planning, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
M.S. Civil
Engineering, North Carolina State University |
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"As Executive
Director of ASCE, I provide leadership on various initiatives
including visioning, strategic planning, and long-range
financial planning. I manage the day-to-day affairs of the
Society and provide direction and support to a staff of 240 and
an active volunteer leadership of over 7,500." |
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"To prepare for the
challenges they will face, students must gain project management
and communication skills, learn foreign languages, and be
proficient with computers." |
 
"Professional associations give students an opportunity to come face to
face with leaders in the profession, and to understand the teaching side
of it, the business side of it, the government side of it. And to choose
which way they want to go."
"You can't have civilization without having civil engineers. We build the
quality of life, we maintain the quality of life. And as long as people
have a demand for higher and higher quality of life there'll be a demand
for civil engineers."
"I decided to study civil engineering when I was a sophomore in high
school. And it's sort of ironic, but I picked up a brochure that ASCE
produced, and it said Your Career in Civil Engineering. And after looking
at that, and reading through it -- and it talked about the different
disciplines within civil engineering -- transportation, hydraulics,
construction, design, structural design. And it was just fascinating. And
I can remember now, I was in geometry class, and at that moment I decided
I was going to be a civil engineer. Lo and behold, I didn't think that 30
years later I would be working for the American Society of Civil
Engineers."
Q: When did you decide to
study civil engineering?
Davis:
I decided to study civil
engineering when I was a sophomore in high school. And it's sort of
ironic, but I picked up a brochure that ASCE produced, and it said Your
Career in Civil Engineering. After looking at it, and reading through it
it talked about the different disciplines within civil engineering --
transportation, hydraulics, construction, design, structural design, etc.,
it was just fascinating. I can remember now, I was in geometry class, and
at that moment I decided I was going to be a civil engineer. Lo and
behold, I didn't think that 30 years later I would be working for the
American Society of Civil Engineers.
Q: Where did you go to
school -- undergrad -- and talk about your course load, how you zeroed in
on your specialty.
Davis:
Well as I said, once I decided
to be a civil engineer, there were a limited number of civil engineering
schools. I think there are like 237 civil engineering schools in this
country. But back in the 60's when I was picking a school there were
probably 50 top schools. And I applied to about ten of the top schools,
including MIT and Carnegie Mellon, but I ended up at North Carolina State
University because it was financial. And it was also in Raleigh, where I
grew up. And I have a bachelor's in civil engineering from North Carolina
State University. I have a master's in regional planning from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is another story. Also,
I have a master's in civil engineering, again, from North Carolina State
University. I worked on my PhD at the University of Maryland here in
College Park, and I finished ... work, and got promoted and never finished
school. But that's sort of my academic background. I had a lot of training
subsequent to that in management at Harvard, and at the University of
Pennsylvania.
Q: Was there anything
throughout your education that you found particularly difficult, or, on
the other side of that, easy?
Davis:
Difficult? Civil engineering
is difficult. It's very complex when you start talking about designing and
building things that people use in their day-to-day lives and never really
think about. Designing an airport, or designing a highway bridge, or
developing water systems that you drink. Or sanitary systems. So it's all
very complex, but it was a lot of fun. And under no circumstance would I
think any part of it is easy, but I would say it was difficult but fun.
Q: Did you participate in
any co-ops or internships while you were an undergrad or in graduate
school?
Davis:
Well, I think co-ops and
internships are great, but during my time you've got to realize that the
country was in war. We were at war in Vietnam even though we didn't
declare war. If you didn't finish in your four-year time frame you were
off to war. And we worked hard to finish in four years, which meant we had
to take 18, 19 hours per semester, which was a really extraordinarily
heavy load. And we had to finish within the four-year window. So a couple
of summers I went to summer school in order to maintain that pace of
graduating within four years. Civil engineers today graduate in about 4.7
years, so it was a whole different mix then, and we didn't have time for
co-ops. I think a four-year program is all that was recognized at that
point in time. A five-year program would have put you right as a candidate
for the draft.
Q: So in lieu of, I guess,
co-ops, what kind of engineering-specific activities did you participate
in? Was it just mostly course work and taking the classes to get the
degree?
Davis:
When you have 18 hours a
semester the most you can do is have fun in labs. We didn't have an
opportunity to get out and work while I was an undergraduate. Not at all.
Q: Do you find that you
use a lot of what you learned in college in the workplace?
Davis:
For 20 years I actually worked
in civil engineering, and my specialty was transportation. So we were
designing and building railroads, airports, and I did a lot of highway
work. And then finally I worked for a shipping company where we built
ports around the world. One of the things that I learned in graduate
school that I remember was Queue Theory. When you are faced with a
situation where you have 20 lanes of traffic and 40-50 trucks backed up in
each lane and you're trying to get those containers on a vessel, and you
don't make money until the truck gets on the vessel, Queue Theory becomes
very important. I think the planning that I went through in planning
school comes through more often because we're now always trying to seek
consensus. We have a lot of committees, seven or eight hundred committees,
doing work at ASCE at any point in time. And our goal is to make sure that
we can bring them to consensus.
Q: Do you think that
there's anything that colleges could be doing in order to prepare students
better?
Davis:
I think that one, the
bachelors degree cannot be the professional degree for any engineering
discipline, especially civil engineering. I think the master's level is
really where you should consider yourself a professional. Saying that,
then, as an undergraduate, you need to take more courses. Especially civil
engineers because we deal with the public on a day-to-day basis. And it's
important that civil engineers know how to communicate, orally and in
writing. And also be able to stand up at a public hearing and say things
in a very simplistic way, versus giving all of the technical operational
entities of a water treatment plant, just say that guys, we do things and
give you clean water. You turn on your shower this morning -- you can take
a shower thanks to us, versus telling them all the technical aspects of
tertiary treatment at a water treatment plant.
Q: Is there anything that
students could do to prepare themselves?
Davis:
I think that students should
get involved in the community that they're working in. I think that civil
engineering students should get out and work with the city departments,
the traffic departments, or the planning departments. And even give free
labor. Because what they want to do is understand how they're going to fit
into this whole work force at the appropriate time. Also, they can do a
lot of activities for high schools. They can go visit high schools and
communicate to students in the fourth, fifth, sixth grade about the
importance of math and science. Around the seventh or eighth grade they
can steer themselves. But if they don't do it early on they won't be able
to do that. They also should be part of a debate club, and learn how to
manage disagreement, because throughout their careers there will be a lot
of people that'll be on the other side. And if they can work through those
kinds of discussions and try to get win-win solutions I think they'll have
gleaned a tremendous amount of knowledge.
Q: How about professional
associations?
Davis:
Professional associations give students an opportunity to come face to
face with leaders in the profession, and to understand the teaching side
of it, the business side of it, the government side of it. And to choose
which way they want to go. Do they want to be a researcher, do they want
to be a government official, or do they want to design and construct
facilities, or manage the companies that design and construct the
facilities, or just be a member of industry. Beyond that, we take a
student from the time they graduate, after they've gone through the
preparatory stage, to the time that they retire. And we have programs that
help them every stage of the way. Because when they graduate one of the
things they want to do is get some real solid design experience so they
can get registered. Because it's only through registration that we then
fulfill our mission to help people build a quality of life. And we have to
be technically proficient, and that's sort of our badge to the public, is
that guys, we're qualified to design and to build, and you can drive over
it at 80 miles an hour on a wet night and feel secure. And so we have
programs each stage of the way. When they move up to a project manager
stage they can do certain things. When they move up to an owner stage they
can do other things.
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