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Asala,-o-alaikum, I need an advice regarding postgraduate studies. By grace of Almighty I received an admission letter from Technical University Dresden, Germany in ACCESS (Advanced Computational and Civil Engineering Structural Studies) program. And Inshallah will have admission letter from Swinburne university Australia as well. As I graduated in 2015 and have not landed a proper structure job yet, so i need a suggestion that should i go with masters or gain some experience prior to it? Thanks.

Pickup columns or planted columns are structural cols supported on transfer slabs or beams (which you are referring as pickup beams i think). For seismic design you have to overdesign collector elements like transfer beams or slabs by omega factor. Issues with pickup cols is loads in them depend on stiffness of slabs/beams supporting them. If supports are flexible they are literally just hanging threads from slabs above carrying little or no load at all, you cannot just manually transfer loads to them by distributary area. Another thing is to check deflection at upper and below slabs as well as punching on both slabs. Make sure the transfer slab has sufficient shear strength. Another issue might be consteuction sequence and long term deflections due to these columns. Also make sure you check for irregularity clauses of seismic code.

First you must be clear about requirements (arch, mep etc). Have a clear understanding of dwgs, are the cols masonary, non load bearing? Have you prepared 2, 3 different struc schemes? If you think you can value engineer and reduce cols, check with client req if they too want it. Then you make sure the scheme is working, deflections, load paths, foundations, framing, cost. Reducing cols mean, bigger beam and slab spans and so more deflections. Have you checked that? Also more local load on foundations if cols are far, and more sway in wind/eq bcz less bending stiffness of vertical elements (if you are not increasing col/wall sizes to compensate that). If above is okay, you can eliminate cols that are not required. As a struc engr you have to be proactive, pitchin and promote the "most efficient" scheme that is "simple" and "necessary".

Nothing specific. There is nothing wrong with having this many columns. These columns are more like confined masonry columns rather than structural columns. Sanity checks. Your results should make sense and load path should be complete. Pick-up beams?