About Me | Durga KC

2015

Nepal Earthquake

7.8 Magnitude · Nearly 9,000 Lives Lost

I was in high school when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal on April 25, 2015, killing nearly 9,000 people. In the aftermath, every conversation was about structures. Why did they collapse? Who designed them? Could they have been built to survive? I made up my mind. I would understand how structures fail, and how to make sure they don't.

Determined to pursue that path, I sat for the IOE entrance examination and ranked 71st out of over 13,000 candidates. I earned admission to Pulchowk Campus, the top engineering institution in Nepal, on a full four-year merit-based scholarship.

At Pulchowk Campus — B.Eng. Civil Engineering

Four years at Pulchowk Campus shaped how I think about structures. The curriculum was rigorous, the resources were limited, and that combination forced us to understand fundamentals deeply before ever touching software.

My capstone project was the design of a reinforced concrete bridge over a river in rural Nepal. We surveyed the site ourselves, profiled the river channel, and designed the structure from scratch. It was the first time I worked on a bridge, and it confirmed what the earthquake had already told me: this is what I want to do.

I graduated with a Bachelor of Civil Engineering in 2022.

With Dr Rajan Suwal: Undergraduate Capstone Project Defense

On-site at a river crossing, discussing the survey approach

Profile Surveying of a River Channel for Bridge Design

At UT San Antonio — M.S. Civil (Structural) Engineering

After graduating from Pulchowk and working as a civil engineer in Nepal, I wanted to go deeper into bridge engineering. Not just design them from a code book, but understand the actual behavior of the materials and systems that hold them together.

That question brought me to UT San Antonio, where I joined a TxDOT-funded research program evaluating 300 ksi prestressing strands for pretensioned concrete bridge girders. What started as curiosity about how bridges fail became a full-time pursuit: instrumenting, casting, loading, and breaking full-scale girders at the Large-Scale Testing Lab.

Just another Tuesday at The Large-Scale Testing Lab

Just another Tuesday @ The Large-Scale Testing Lab of UT San Antonio

Harry Potter

Every book read, every film watched, at least eight times over. Harry Potter was my childhood. And I'd be lying if I said I never expected a Hogwarts letter.

Movies

Movie fanatic. Pirates of the Caribbean. The Dark Knight. Inception. Tenet. Oppenheimer. Interstellar. I don't watch films once. I rewatch them until I catch what I missed the first five times.

Scores

Hans Zimmer. Ludwig Göransson. "He's a Pirate", "Cornfield Chase", "No Time for Caution", "Detach", "Can You Hear the Music", "Posterity", "Wakanda", "Dream is Collapsing". I listen to scores, not songs. The music tells the story the dialogue can't.

Physics

Interstellar made me curious. I understand structural mechanics well enough to break bridge girders for a living. But the physics beyond that? Relativity, quantum mechanics, the geometry of spacetime. I don't understand most of it. And that's exactly what fascinates me. The deeper it goes, the more it humbles you, and the harder it is to stop reading about it.