What is Civil?
Creating a better world
Be it providing access to drinking water or designing a city, as a civil engineer the difference you make is tangible.
On this path, you directly impact people’s lives every day.
Look around you ... What would you change?
Designing a resilient future
With temperatures rising, societies developing and more demands on our planet, civil engineers are needed now more than ever.
As we face new challenges, we need people like you to help us design a more resilient world.
What problems do civil engineers solve?
Why design a skyscraper to be flexible, add extra sand to a beach or change a bridge that has stood for over a century?
As a civil engineer, your work has a direct impact on people and communities.
Civil engineers help guarantee access to clean water, in many ways, including:
- Designing and constructing water supply systems
- Wastewater management and treatment
- Minimising impact through water conservation, irrigation, dams, reservoirs and ecosystems
- Developing technologies for purification, desalination and more
- Humanitarian efforts and disaster response.
The UN links water to all 17 of its Sustainable Development Goals, and access to water plays a big role in several social problems – including poverty, gender, inequality and violence.
Civil engineers play a crucial role in designing, constructing and maintaining infrastructure.
Maintaining an infrastructure that ensures the safe and efficient movement of people and goods, and addressing transportation challenges for communities of all sizes.
Beyond traditional infrastructure such as roads, highways, railways, bridges and tunnels, civil engineers also develop and optimise public transit systems and sustainable transport routes, including:
- Bicycle lanes
- Pedestrian walking routes
- Electric vehicle infrastructure
- Sustainable transport options.
By preparing for and managing the effects of extreme weather, civil engineers play a vital role in keeping us safe and minimising damage to our communities.
Here’s how:
- Dams, levees, drainage systems – civil engineers manage and divert floodwaters to stop them overflowing towns and cities
- Designing buildings and bridges resilient to strong winds, earthquakes, wildfires and more
- Developing underground drains and retention basins that help with stormwater management
- Areas prone to hurricanes and tsunamis need sea walls, breakwaters and other measures to protect coastlines from large waves and storm surges
- Every area needs good emergency planning. Civil engineers help create evacuation routes - even design emergency shelters to keep people safe during extreme weather events.
Designing, delivering and managing our energy infrastructure? That’s what you could be doing as a civil engineer.
Right now, we’re trying to expand the use of renewable energy, so that together we can reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
Through our work in building the infrastructure needed to harness and distribute clean energy, we effect the following forms of energy:
- Solar energy
- Wind energy
- Hydropower
- Geothermal energy
- Bioenergy
- Energy storage and grid integration.
Now, we’re integrating environmentally friendly practices and designing buildings that can survive in a world of changing climate and weather conditions.
- Energy-efficient buildings
- Water conservation
- Sustainable urban planning
- Waste management
- Renewable energy integration
- Resilient infrastructure.
Did you know that the battery of an electric car is almost twice as heavy as that of the same model of a non-electric car?
That means our bridges, carparks and roads, the safety and resilience of these, all need to be adjusted.
How else are we adapting?
- Reducing carbon emitted during construction. The built environment accounts for 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions (CIOB, 2023)
- Developing new materials for structures
- Protecting cities and historic environments from increased flood and weather risk.
Civil is about bringing ideas on a page into real life, I love that it's an opportunity to make a difference to the future - you're literally impacting how society will operate and adapt in years to come.
How can you get started?
What does studying civil engineering look like? How can you choose between one course or another? What does BEng and MEng mean?
Everyone has lots of questions when they’re just getting started, so we’ve put together some resources for you. Be it our ‘Which course is right for me?’ quiz, undergraduate brochures or the links to each of our course profiles – we’ve put it all together for you below.
That includes our recommended resources from UCAS and the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). All our Civil Engineering courses are accredited by ICE, which is ideal when it comes to entering industry with your educational base for achieving chartered engineer status, but more on that later ...
There are many ways to keep in the know with all our advice and guidance when it comes to applying to, and studying civil engineering.
The easiest way is to sign up for notifications from us directly, by filling in the short form below.
You can also follow us on Instagram and TikTok, where we share interesting takes from life as a science and engineering student at Manchester.
If you’re considering Civil Engineering at Manchester, join us for an Open Day!
Open Days are on campus events which provide you with the opportunity to meet lecturers, admissions staff and students. At these events you can also enjoy guided tours of our world-leading facilities and explore our Engineering Exhibition – it's a day full of opportunities to ask as many questions as you want. Book your place at our next Open Day.
Alternatively, you can attend one of the university’s virtual Open Days. They're incredibly popular, providing a great overview of life here at the university. Book onto our next virtual event.
Once you have the shortlist of courses and universities you are interested in, it’s time to start your UCAS application. This process isn’t as scary as it sounds. On our brochure, you can find a checklist of everything you need to do to apply.
Our entry requirements are AAA, with our typical contextual offer being AAB. You can find all of our courses linked on the resources section of this page, and you can find out more about contextual admissions.
We also offer an Integrated Foundation Year, which is the ideal way to build a solid foundation with us before proceeding to your course of choice. In fact, our students who have also completed a Foundation Year, tell us it made them feel more prepared for the course and settled into uni life than their peers!
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Play the game: ICE CityZen Pollution
We have something for you! Explore the built environment and see if you can figure out ‘whodunnit’ in this game developed for the Institution of Civil Engineers.
Hint: you’re trying to find out the cause of different forms of pollution …
Where to go from here
Getting to know Civil
