Curriculum

The Master’s in Construction Management & Engineering is a full-time study programme that consists of two years, in which you will collect a total of 120 EC. In your first year and the first quartile of the second year, you will follow (elective) courses and you will end your Master’s by writing your master’s thesis.

European Credit Transfer System

Student workload at Dutch universities is expressed in EC, also named ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System), which is widely used throughout the European Union. In the Netherlands, each credit represents 28 hours of work.

Content of your Master's

What your curriculum will look like depends on the choices you make in composing your Master’s. There is a set of courses from which you have to pick 10 specialisation courses. Whether you want to focus more on the management or the engineering part of your specialisation, or maybe even a specific theme: there will always be courses that suit your interests. These courses allow you to go in a specific direction and specialise even further.

Elective courses

Within this Master’s, there is a lot to choose even beyond your specialisation. You have a great deal of freedom in choosing elective courses outside your specialisation, as long as you comply with the assumed previous knowledge. You can choose courses offered at UT (of the Master’s in Civil Engineering & Management or the Master’s in Industrial Design Engineering, for example), but moreover, you can follow courses at Eindhoven University of Technology or Delft University of Technology.

Construction Management & Engineering

	Number of EC
Specialisation courses You need to choose at least ten* of the specialisation-related courses.*	50 EC	Building Information Modelling (BIM) Construction Supply Chains and Digitization Planning and Process Management Structural Health Monitoring for Smart Infrastructure Legal & Governance Aspects Civil Engineering Challenges Digital Twinning in Infrastructure Circular Design & Deconstruction Culture in International Construction Transitions in Civil Engineering Urban Resilience in a Changing Climate Value Management Construction Project & Programme Management Machine Learning Applications in Civil Engineering Infrastructure Asset Management Sustainable Transportation Infrastructure Subsurface Infrastructure Engineering & Data Management Value Driven Procurement & Organising
CEM electives You can choose three courses of other specialisations within the Master’s in Civil Engineering & Management/Construction Management & Engineering. Of course, you can also choose more of the specialisation courses listed above.	15 EC	Examples of electives that perfectly fit this specialisation: Sustainable Engineering Geotechnical Modelling Geo Risk Assessment
Free elective courses	15 EC	You can fill up the rest of your elective space with courses that match your interests and ambitions. There is a wide range of courses you can choose from, both from the Master’s in CEM and other master’s at UT, or at another partner university in the Netherlands or abroad.
Master’s thesis	40 EC	You will finish your Master’s in CEM with your master’s thesis (30 EC). In order to prepare for your thesis, you will follow the courses Academic Research Skills (5 EC) and Preparation master’s thesis (5 EC).
Total EC	120 EC

Master’s thesis

You will end your Master’s in Construction Management & Engineering with your master’s thesis. The choice of your graduation subject is largely up to you – and the courses you’ve chosen. You could, for example, focus on sustainability and circularity, urban planning and governance, digitisation, procurement strategies, simulations using BIM, international collaboration, or risk management, to name just a few of the many available topics within this Master’s.

Most students complete their graduation project at an external organisation, either in the Netherlands or abroad. This is a highly recommended option since it is a great opportunity to combine your academic skills with experience in the professional field.

Your master’s thesis could involve undertaking projects such as:

Using Building Information Modelling (BIM) to automate environmental impact assessments on infrastructure design, in order to determine the degree of sustainability of an infrastructure project.
Optimising the design of wind turbine foundations by building a machine learning model that can predict the performance of different design alternatives.
Analysing the current use of circular economy principles in construction-related policies and procurement practices of municipalities and providing recommendations for improvement.
Coming up with a documentation strategy for engineering firms in order to work in a transparent and traceable way, something that is increasingly required in today’s world.