Transportation and highway engineering programs prepare people to design highway, road, and other transportation systems. Students learn how to locate and build roads. They also learn to locate and develop transportation sites such as airports.

How would you like to spend three to four hours in your car every day, just commuting? In Seattle and other big cities, that is not unusual. In the past 20 years, the amount of time Americans spend in traffic has more than tripled. So you can see that there is a need for improvements to transportation. And transportation involves more than just highways. People also use railroads, airports, and seaports as they travel.

Designing a highway is a complex task. Just choosing the best location requires you to consider many variables. Construction brings a host of new problems. If there is a hill in your planned path, how much of an incline is acceptable? How much will it cost to blast a roadcut? If the roadcut must curve, how will this affect a driver's line of sight?

In a transportation engineering program, you learn how to answer questions such as these. You learn principles of physics that allow you to calculate the forces at work in structures. You study the properties of materials such as concrete and steel, so that you can predict the effects of these forces. You study how engineers have solved problems in the past, and you research emerging technologies that may lead to new solutions. You learn how to simulate designs on a computer and test them.

Very few colleges offer this program. So you may want to get a bachelor's degree in civil engineering, taking as many transportation engineering courses as possible. This takes four, perhaps five years. It will prepare you for your first job in this field.

Or you may specialize while in graduate school instead. To follow this route, you would get a bachelor's in some other branch of engineering. Then you would enter one of the 20 master's programs in transportation engineering in the U.S. After one or two years beyond your bachelor's, you would earn the master's degree.