Undoubtedly, Structural Analysis is a core discipline in Engineering with a high impact on the society’s comfort, since it supports the design and construction of all infrastructures and pieces of machinery with the required serviceability and safety levels.

On the other hand, it is quite impressive how the technology evolution (mainly since the second half of the XX century) allowed to further explore the methods from Structural Analysis to a level never seen. Nowadays, it is frequent to see world records being achieved in long-span bridges, highest buildings, tunnels’ lengths either underground or sea, among other examples. This fact is due to a perfect marriage between the methods in Structural Analysis and the computational capabilities that the computers nowadays can offer.

In such a context, and taking the most benefit from this perfect marriage, structural problems can become a highly complex task, which they can only be fully tackled with the support of so-called Finite Element software packages. Consequently, the higher is the problem complexity (i.e. the criticality/impact of the structure under analysis in the society, as some examples given above), the higher is the role of fundamental knowledge, know-how, and self-judgment from the expert to understand the obtained results from those software packages. The ability to understand the physics/mechanics behind it, supported by the methods from Structural Analysis is the bottom-line for a successful career as a leading expert in this challenging and exciting field of Engineering.