Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering (archive)

I recently interviewed Dennis and Jonathan Waugh, a father and son who both earned graduate degrees in structural engineering at Iowa State.

Dennis F. Waugh, P.E., S.E. (BSCE 1975, MSCE 1976) is vice president and co-founder of IIW Engineers and Surveyors, P.C., in Dubuque, Iowa, where he directs the civil engineering department. He has been a professional engineer with IIW for 23 years.

Jonathan Waugh (BSCE 2003, MSCE 2004) is currently a PhD student in structural engineering. He hopes to graduate in May 2007. After that, he hopes to be a consulting engineer working on failure investigations or doing complex design work for bridges or buildings.

Why Graduate School?

Dennis: Because I grew up on a farm, working with outdoor projects appealed to me, so I elected civil engineering to obtain my advanced education. I was offered the opportunity of a co-op position, which helped financially, so I obtained good practical experience.

My supervisor asked what specialty I was going to pursue, and I told him I had not yet decided. He told me that if I had a choice, structural engineering would always be needed, and in our area, the expertise was not readily available. This was some of the best advice I have ever taken. I found the structural courses very interesting, and I had an aptitude for material behavior, most likely from my farm background.

A graduate degree in structural is a major advantage because you become exposed to advanced theory which becomes very helpful in the real life applications. I have been involved with some forensic work, and failure of most structures is usually due to unusual behavior that only my graduate education prepared me for. It also has saved me from making mistakes, because I have never had a regular mentor or reviewer in my career after school.

Jon: I grew up seeing the interesting sorts of problems my father worked on as a structural engineer. He told me that if I wanted to do structural engineering I should get a graduate degree because there is too much material to cover in structural engineering for it all to be taught in a bachelor's degree.

That advice was reinforced when I got to ISU and went to the Engineering Career Fair. I talked to different companies about structural engineering, and they all encouraged me to pursue an MS

Dennis: I took the non-thesis option of a self study. My topic, supervised by Dr. F. Wayne Klaiber, was cable-stayed bridges. In 1975 there was only one cable-stayed bridge in the US; all the rest were in Europe and India.

The cable-stayed technology was developed due to scarcity of materials in Germany after WWII and all the German bridges that had been destroyed. The analysis is very difficult to do by hand, and computers have made cable-stay design much easier, and their use has become very common for large river crossings.

Jon: My dissertation is going to be on the simulation of nonrectangular structural walls under arbitrary cyclic loading, with Dr. Sri Sritharan. The topic has important implications for the design of structural walls for building applications in earthquake-prone regions.

Research Equipment

Dennis: Parks Library, a photocopier, and a borrowed electric typewriter. My final report had a lot of exhibits literally "cut and pasted." None of this computer stuff.

Jon: The walls I am simulating will be tested at the Multi-Axial Subassemblage Testing (MAST) facility at the University of Minnesota. This facility was recently completed and is capable of applying six degrees-of-freedom controls to the specimen, allowing loads to be applied in any direction.

Favorite Class

Dennis: This is a toss-up between Dr. Porter's advanced concrete and Dr. Klaiber's prestressed concrete. Both were known for writing on the blackboard with one hand and holding the eraser in the other, but while I quickly copied I thought and understood the basic engineering principles. Both of them presented theory in such a way that I have remembered and used this knowledge since their classes. I still call these two professors once in a while when I have a difficult problem.

Jon: Like my father, I am torn between two classes: Dr. Abendroth's advanced steel design and Dr. Sri's seismic design course. Advanced steel design was exceptionally difficult. One problem took me about six hours to solve; however, I learned a great deal about load and resistance factor design and allowable stress design.

Seismic design was very interesting because it was so different from every other design course. The behavior of the structure as a whole has to be understood to ensure a good design, and you have to approach the problem differently because the structure will not remain elastic.

Dennis: During my undergraduate degree, I lived in a basement on Meadowlane, then a walkout on Kingsbury, then an attic apartment on Burnett Street. I was married for my senior year and graduate school and lived in Pammel Court, which has been the source of many stories. There have been many ISU married graduates that we meet and tell Pammel Court adventures, of which I have to relate a couple.

Since the bedrooms were so small, we shoved the bed tight to the wall, and we both got in on the same side of the bed. One morning, I pulled on the bedspread to make the bed and ripped it because it was frozen to the wall.

Our heater was an oil heater in the middle of the living/dining/kitchen area. When you went home for the weekend or the holidays, we couldn't leave it burning, so we shut it off, hoped for the best, left the kitchen and bathroom faucets dripping, and started the heater as soon as we returned. One time we found ice in the toilet bowl.

Another time I turned on the oil to flow into the fire pot, forgot it for about 15 minutes while we carried stuff in from the car, but tossed in the match to light it anyway. It was OK for a few minutes, but it warmed up real quickly.

When the chimney started glowing a dull red, I hoped we would not have a problem. Having observed this in tractor exhaust, I let it burn down and then vowed to never start the oil without just standing there until it was lit.

But my favorite story now is the time the Department of Public Safety came through with sirens blaring and announcing that a tornado was on the way. Having a key to the structures lab, whose structural testing floor is the best shelter possible on campus, Barb and I went there for cover.

While there, we saw a tornado that destroyed the town of Jordan, near Boone. That is where Jon now lives, in a mobile home that replaced one of the homes destroyed by the tornado that we observed.

Jon: When I was still in high school, I had already decided that I was going to get an MS before I left ISU, so Dad suggested that we look into getting a trailer for me to live in. As Dad mentioned, the trailer sits where a house did that was destroyed in a tornado when they lived in Pammel Court.

Any Time for Fun?

Dennis: You have to find cheap entertainment when you are married and don't have much money. Entertainment usually consisted of socializing with neighbors and sharing disaster stories of living in Pammel Court. A big night out was bowling in the Memorial Union bowling alley.

I was an active church organist at the time, so I would go to Bethesda Lutheran and practice while my wife finished work. The rest of the time was work, study, and the highlight of the week was watching Monty Python's Flying Circus (new series at that time) on Saturday night public TV.

Jon: Well, I greatly enjoy working on the concrete canoe every year. Additionally, I am part of the Nintendo generation so I enjoy playing video games when I have some free time. I also read voraciously, everything from science fiction to books on history and science, and I am a tech news junkie so I read Slashdot daily.

Favorite Part of Graduate School

Dennis: I was most pleased with the continuing revelations that many things were not just "rules of thumb" or "this is how we've always done it" experience, but with the sound application of engineering principles, most things can be calculated and figured out. I often think of Dr. Porter's offer to continue for a PhD. I sometimes regret that I did not pursue it and envy Jon's current PhD opportunity. Secondly, I thoroughly enjoyed the "comfort" of married life in Pammel Court. While the physical environment was not much to be envied, the relationship with neighbors has produced life-long memories.

Jon: My favorite part is learning how various types of structures behave to different load types. And that even very complicated structures behave according to some pretty basics laws. If you return to the fundamental behavior, you can solve problems from the very simple to the very complex.

Additionally, I like the challenge of grad school, the courses are not just "here is a problem, follow this method, or use this section of the code." But rather the emphasis is on why you use that section of the code, where it comes from, or why that analysis method works. The emphasis on understanding fundamental principles is part of what gets me excited to go to class every day.