Hello, my name is Ibrahim Odeh, I'm a professor at Columbia University at the School of Engineering at the Department of Civil Engineering. At our department, we do have several specializations in Civil Engineering and one of the specializations is Construction Management or for shortening it, CM. Our CM program at the department is actually the biggest program we have at the department, from all our other programs. And I am one of the faculties, who run and lead the Construction Management program for the department here at the Columbia University. In addition, I am the founder and the director of one crucial component for our Construction Management program. Which is more focused in to doing industry research or industry advising. And this specialization or actually this specific component of the program, we call it, the Global Leaders in Construction Management with shortening to GLCM. The GLCM just a briefly, is focused on nominating the top MS or a graduate students at our Construction Management program. That they are not just having a good or excellent degree but also, what my humble opinion, I believe have good communication skills from writing and presenting, which is sometimes actually much more important than just the technical knowledge. So having one without the other, it's kind of a weakness. So what we do at our GLCM component or what we call the International Component of the program. We take the nominated students between seven to eight students, to overseas to visit one country. And we do more analysis about, what's the status of the construction market in that country. And how would this be forming for the last several years and where is this heading for the near and long term future? How we do this, actually we are fortunate to have a several connections with CEO's and corporate executives from leaving construction firms here in Manhattan and overseas. And they do open a lot of doors for us to help and to use us in the country, where we are visiting. Regional CEO's, top managers and engineers sit with them, spend time with them in each academic year, and help answer several questions for us. In addition to that, they take us, luckily, to construction sites visits, where we have the opportunity to do an actual experience from the practicality of how building a building or an infrastructure in these countries. With that, I want to welcome you at our specialization and let's get started. Before I dig deeper into the Construction Management Specialization that we will be covering here, and talk about all our courses that we will be speaking and presenting. I would like to take one or two minutes to tell you a little bit about the nature of our construction industry. So, our industry actually is not a new industry. Its an old industry. We were building buildings, homes, shelters, since the dawn of mankind. With time, the projects and the nature of our projects, of course, started recently to become more complicated. The pallet itself becoming bigger and bigger. We started to have limited budgets, and they were starting to have much more parties involved in that project itself. Not just like a builder and an owner and a designer, but much, much, much more, which we will of course tell you and explain much more details in that for that the courses later. So in addition to the construction industry that has all these parties involved, the construction industry consumes a lot of resources. That you really need to be very efficient in managing these resources. From construction materials, from construction equipments. From the manpower, from the money that you have in hand. How you wanna spend it, in what aspect, and so on. So because the complications and because of this kind of nature that we have, our market needs you to learn how to effectively manage such a project with such an environment. That is why we are offering this specialization. And the several courses in the specialization, to help you understand how to manage the construction project. And how to help you interact with all the parties. Because if you want to step back here and think about how many people involved, and the parties I was just referring to. You are talking about general contractors, subcontractors, you're talking about designers and engineers, architects, and even when we talk about engineers, there is all types of engineers from structural engineering, mechanical, electrical and so on. Also, you have the owners who own the project. You have sometimes an owner representative for that project, and sometimes, of course, you have financials to finance. The project from sometimes banks, from sometimes private financial institutions and so on. So now because of all this nature, we tried as much as possible what we believe that the development of the specialization will help anyone in our field from the I just introduced to take the specialization and to learn from the fundamentals and the basics on how to run a project and how to communicate with each one in the teams, and to kind of speak the same language, if you want to say that. So with that, I would welcome you again. And let's start by talking more about the specialization. As you can see here, we do have four courses for the time being that they are the four main essential topics, a field engineer or CM, a Construction Manager needs to understand in order to give him or her an over review about how to manage from a to z a project starting from a construction project initiation and a planning. And in this course, we will introduce you to the main fundamentals and the basics of how to initiate a project and a plan for it from day one. We also introduce very special topics in this course from series of guest speakers or speakers in collaboration in the industry from the companies we work with, to come and tell you some major components that highlighting the trends that we are seeing in the market that it's very important for you to understand from the beginning, initiating and planning phase of a project. Second, Construction of Project schedule. In this class or in this course, we will introduce to you also the fundamentals of scheduling mechanism. Scheduling tools and processes to help you as a CM, to put the right network diagram for your project, and to be able to manage it effectively. For example, we will cover couple of fundamentals of bar chart, we will cover couple of fundamentals of precedence diagrams, activity on arrow, PERT, range estimating, linear project operations, and line of. Course number three will be focusing in construction cost, estimating and cost control. In this course also, we will introduce to you the foundation of the area of cost estimate, and cost control and value. Cost control and value engineering, this course we will be covering the foundations and types of cost estimation from the conceptual design to the detailed design. And also, to introduce to you the cost control component for newer projects from all the like cycle. And to highlight the importance of the break even analysis in construction tasks, in a project. The value of money in construction industry is also another course we will be covering which is essential for a CM or project manager in the construction field, to cover some basic knowledge about the economic fundamentals and the mathematics of money that is essential component to impact your construction project. We will cover something related to, how to develop and read a cash flow diagrams, types of interest rates, some of the analysis of the present worth analysis, and equivalent worth analysis, and the future analysis. And that will be also in collaboration with several industry partners we have as we would be doing, as you can see from the first course in the specialization.
