Infrastructure and Community Resilience through the Lens of Civil Engineering Students

Community resilience, as a heterogeneous set of components, includes many interconnected systems that actively interact with each other. These sociotechnical networks in their default forms are not always aligned, and therefore the resultant move or change may not be as expected. One system that has a significant role in the community resilience’s comprehensiveness is the educational system, which provides a considerable input for workforce required to design, develop, execute, and maintain resilient infrastructure and communities. To explore to what extent civil engineering and construction programs provide their students with adequate training about infrastructure and community resilience, a study was conducted in 2019–2020. The study had two primary research questions. First, how do construction and civil engineering male and female students perceive different aspects of infrastructure and community resilience? Second, how can relevant academic programs increase the subject interest and knowledge of students and pave their paths to become community resilience professionals and managers? A quantitative research methodology was used to gather, model, and analyze data. After preliminary studies, a survey was designed and distributed to collect civil engineering students’ perceptions. A total of 382 students from 15 higher education institutions in the US participated in the survey. While the results indicated a gap in participants’ perceptions toward resilience definition, factors, scope, and tools, students showed undeveloped potentials that can be exploited by community resilience educators and administration.