Looking for Advice/Experience

[KRC]

Hello all, looking for some suggestions from those of you who have studied/are active professionals in Engineering or Construction Management.

I have a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy, and a Master of Arts in communications. My overall undergrad GPA is poor, and my major GPA's (dual major) are 3.6 and 3.7 respectively. My MA was awarded with distinction and my GPA there is a 4.0. GRE's 670M/570V/4.5Q (will retake--didn't study very much for them as they were not weighed very heavily at all where I received my MA).

Since receiving my BA I have worked as an operations manager in several different locations across the country and for several different companies, mostly doing supply chain and management stuff. I have two years supervisory/hands on experience, and four years management experience. During that time I "drifted" into something of a project management role from time to time; nothing major, but there have been spans of time over the last six years where what I was doing was construction project management. For a variety of reasons I want to leave OM and switch over to construction management. Without substantial work experience and with about as unrelated a degree as I can have for the field, I feel that pursuing a Masters is necessary to secure even an assistant PM job.

I have done a fair amount of planning as to how acquiring an Engineering or CM degree with basically no experience would work, and my thought is do take some courses at a community college or 4-year school in Eng of CM to get a feel for the field and maybe get some contacts (which I have already done), and then take a course or two (or three) as a non-matriculated student at the university I wish to attend, and provided all goes well, apply for acceptance to the program.

The programs that are in the Bay Area (I am constrained geographically for the next 4-5 years) that have CM are Stanford, Berkeley and San Jose State's CE departments, and Cal State East Bay's CM program (in its Eng department).

As you can probably tell, my question is: is this feasible? Even if I do all the prereq's, get A's in all the graduate level Eng/CM courses as a non-matric. student, get LoR's from department faculty, etc. etc., is not having a bachelor's degree in Eng/CM such a red flag that getting admission is impossible? My low overall UG GPA and non-existent work experience don't help either.

I'm willing to do what it takes to be ready to apply, but am hoping to hear stories/experiences about "non-traditional" applicants in Engineering or Construction Management.

Thanks!

[ktel]

I don't feasibly see how you could get into an engineering graduate degree program without an engineering undergraduate degree (or closely related degree) or a significant amount of experience (which you probably couldn't get without an undergraduate degree). As a professional field, you need to be properly accredited.

I did see something like this: http://extension.berkeley.edu/cert/const.html that doesn't explicitly say you need a related bachelor's degree, and the courses don't look overly "engineer-y".

I think I'm just confused about what you actually want to do. You could get into construction management without being an engineer, but there would be certain things you wouldn't be qualified to do.