Graduates with the track Future Ports and Waterways can work as technical managers in private companies or port and coastal administrations. You can participate in the construction of multi-purpose port terminals, adjust the layout of ports in order to make them more efficient and sustainable and manage the port activities from dredging to ship rotation. 

You will get competences in:

• Common design methods for ports
• waterways and other coastal facilities
• Dredging and disposal concepts for sediments
• management of inland waterways hydraulic structures and riverbanks.

You will also acquire the core and soft skills necessary to:

• manage a team or a business
• understand and lead actions related to corporate social responsibility
• understand and implement engineering solutions towards resilience and adaptability for ports and waterways due to climate changes.

Graduates from the track Coastal Environmental Engineering are likely to go on to become technical directors in private or public companies, which overarching aim is to achieve a more effective coastal environmental conservation while enhancing coastal protection/quality through solution-oriented strategies for biodiversity protection, human wellbeing and cost-effective (ecosystem-based) climate adaptation/mitigation.

Circumventing the current climate change impact situation at the coastal zone requires a new level of quantitative understanding on eco-geomorphic and socio-economic interactions with climate. With track 2 you gain new knowledge to incorporate these feedbacks into the delivery of ecosystem services (e.g., coastal protection and water quality) under climate/anthropic interactions (e.g., loss of coastal water quality incompatible with aquaculture/tourism – blue growth), in support of an overdue socio-economic alignment with natural processes. This challenge applies especially to climate/biodiversity hotspots, such as low laying coasts, deltaic/estuarine (transitional) environments and narrow sandy beaches.

Graduates from track 3 Shore Management is geared towards engineers positions as technical officers or technical directors in public agencies, national, regional and local coastal communities or in consultancy companies involved in the management, planning and development of the coastal zone.

You will get competences of:

• Physical processes responsible for coastline evolution
• Common design methods for coastal structures and shore protection
• Management of planning activities from a local scale to a regional or national scale
• Basic knowledge of international law regarding the exploitation of the maritime space
• Basic understanding of socio-economical exploitation of the coastal zone (recreational and/vs production activities)
• Resilience and adaptation to climate changes
• Corporate responsibility, ethics and self-consciousness in the workplace

You will understand both the basic physical processes responsible for coastal evolution and the consequences in socio-economic and environmental terms of different choices of coastal planning and development. The professional figure trained in this track will have the skills and the know-how to deal with the challenges of coastal management both from the point of view of the individual basic problems and in a general perspective.