In addition to providing public engineering services, the Army Corps of Engineers provided members of the Marshall University community with information Thursday, during an Army Corps of Engineers day in the Memorial Student Center.

“There is a misconception about what the Army Corps of Engineers does,” said Todd Mitchell, an employee of the Army Corps of Engineers. “They (Marshall students) don’t realize that it is a multidiscipline organization and a lot of Marshall’s different curriculum align well with the skills sets that we are looking for.”

Many of the degree programs at Marshall are within the Army Corps of Engineers, Mitchell said, and events like Army Corps of Engineers day, which was set up by the Army Corps of Engineers and Marshall’s Career Services Center, are a good way to show what the Corps has to offer for Marshall students.

The event at Marshall is designed to reach out to students looking for a career after graduation, said Chuck Minsker, public relations specialist for the Army Corps of Engineers. The displays are set up to show a student the different career paths they could take within the Corps, Minsker said.

“There really is a lot of different jobs that we do within the Army Corps of Engineers,” Minsker said. “We have over 1,000 employees just in the Huntington District building.”

The Army Corps of Engineers is broken up into districts across the country to help flood control, and Huntington is home to one of those districts, Minsker said.

The Huntington district alone covers 45,000 square miles, which are in West Virginia, Ohio, eastern Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia, Minsker said.

Army Corps of Engineer districts are broken up by how the water drains into the rivers, Minsker said, and the Army Corps of Engineers has lock and dams along the Ohio and Kanawha river to allow boats to pass through carrying coal and other materials.

“In the old days, rivers would dry up in the summer and flood in the spring, so the locks and dams help the Army Corps of Engineers control that to have the rivers and boats running all year round,” Minsker said.

The Army Corps of Engineers also helps with building docks and other projects, Minsker said. He said the Corps writes permits for those projects in the Regulatory Office in the Huntington District building.

“Anything that affects the waterways, the Corps helps regulate those kinds of projects,” Minsker said.

The Corps also helps communities by designing water and sewer systems, Minsker said.

Engineers are just part of the careers the Corps has to offer. There are jobs in almost every field designed to deal with different kinds of issues that might arise within the Corps, Minsker said.

Madalyn McCoy can be contacted at [email protected].