The prepared text of a speech given at the Engineering Science Alumni Dinner, Friday 04 April 2008.
Good evening. I have been asked to speak briefly about my personal experience, and about student development and leadership in the Division of Engineering Science. This is an extraordinarily difficult assignment. Not only do I follow Prof. Cheng and others of intellect and stature, but you, my audience, are a variety of Engineering Science undergraduates and alumni. If the Registrar's office is correct, at least three quarters of you are smarter than me. So though I resolve to avoid truisms about the Division, I am all but guaranteed to put my foot in my mouth. Please forgive me.
Yet perhaps that is a good place to start. I once had a proclivity for offering wholly fabricated technical explanations for things I knew next to nothing about. It didn't help that these explanations were plausible and often accepted, or that only my mother regularly saw through my 'BS'. In fact, not until I arrived at UofT and encountered some uncommonly brilliant classmates did I learn to shut my mouth and truly think before I spoke.
And this is what EngSci does; it changes you. It transforms you from the big fish in the small pond to a very self-conscious tadpole in a startlingly wide ocean. It makes you aware, through duress, of precisely where your limits lie, and how grossly you had underestimated them. It alters your perspective on learning — from a classroom activity to the first step in solving any worthy problem.
The one thing it does not change, however, is natural curiosity. The typical EngSci student is a "What's next?" person. As early as primary school, she was impatient with her teachers and the curriculum. "What's next?" was what she wanted to know. As an undergraduate, he stumbles to class at the tail end of an all-nighter to submit an assignment, yet wearily asks, "What's next?" (Usually another problem set!) And I would argue, upon graduation, we still demand to know "What's next?"
Well, what is next? We are often told that "the world is getting smaller." I feel this is misleading; the Earth and the human race remain mind-bogglingly large. What is meant is that everything is now done faster...bigger, longer, and more often than a decade or century ago. Every aspect of human endeavour is amplified, and the effects are writ large on the planet, our society and ourselves.
Engineering is a key mechanism of this progress, especially the traditional engineer's happy function of devising better widgets. But it is increasingly apparent that the erstwhile reading of 'better' — that is, cheaper, more powerful, longer-lasting — was naïve. Further, the very concept of the traditional engineer has all but been thrown out the window.
As EngScis, we know this innately. We know that when the widget is part of a more durable assault rifle, or when it is a valve in a more powerful but gas-hungry automobile engine, 'better' becomes a false descriptor. Other examples are less stark, yet we know that engineers in traditional disciplines still spend a majority of their time iterating problems already solved. Meanwhile, poverty, hunger, anthropogenic climate change and armed conflict continue.
Many of us are here precisely because we have so little patience with that widget. We know what it is, and does; we want to know "what's next?" Where codes of engineering ethics urge us not to harm society through negligence, many EngScis proactively take their talents to the fields of medicine, law, governance and humanitarianism. We view today's challenges not merely as a heavy obligation attendant on our profession — though they are that — but an opportunity for sophisticated analysis, creative design and elegant solutions.
This is what I see in the Division's motto — Engineers For The World, E4TW — which always earns some eye-rolling as a "cheesy rip-off" of the older and more brash ERTW. Such eye-rolling is symptomatic of the way we sometimes ape the sterotype of the traditional engineer. The Division staff have given it serious thought, and the outcomes are exciting student development activities, some of which I have been privileged to take part in.
Several of these are curricular. Through the Praxis courses and a fourth-year, student-facilitated seminar, we discuss ethics, real intelligent design and issues like water security, technology transfer to developing countries, and nuclear power versus proliferation. After asking itself "What's next?" the Division is introducing an Energy Option this fall, because that is among the most pressing of the coming global resource issues.
Few EngScis left behind student governance, social activism, musicianship and athletic excellence when they came here. For many, it was obvious what was next, and the result is a disproportionate number of EngScis leading student groups, clubs and teams across the university. The Division thus took the laudable step of joining the Leaders of Tomorrow program, which encompasses student working groups, tailored workshops for personal development, and even a full-term course taught by former DuPont Canada CEO and Chairman — and UofT grad — David Colcleugh.
The students in these working groups, classes and workshops learn communications, motivation and goal-setting. They learn to think, to respond carefully and decisively to complex issues in complex organizations — and very often they think of their juniors in the Division and ask "How can I pass on what I've just learned?" The Division obliged by creating venues such as Online Orientation for incoming first years, and peer tutoring groups where mentorship promotes learning outside of the classroom.
It is exhilarating to be part of these changes, and see them working. Their aim is clear. The EngSci student is already driven by instinct to discover "What's next?" But when she graduates equipped with a world-class technical background plus an awareness of emerging problems and of her capacity to lead, she becomes a truly formidable force for change. No leap of the imagination is required to predict that such people will topple barriers, shift paradigms and redefine 'better'.
So, "What's next?" New realms of engineering. As undergraduates, we must believe our professors when they remind us that the true challenges lie beyond exams and problem sets.
"What is next?" Leadership. My fellow 0T7+PEYs and 0T8s, we must realize that we are equipped for more than just 'a job' or 'more school.'
"What is next?" Alumni, professors and mentors, we rely on you to help us answer this question — please, when you meet younger EngScis, graduate or no, dangle some impossible, Herculean task in front of them. The results will certainly astound you.
As part of the excellent course APS501 Leadership & Leading for Groups & Organizations, we were offered leading (ha) questions and guidelines for writing a personal mission statement. Before you scream "Flake!" you should know our professor did more or less the same in his mid-20s, and considered it instrumental in attaining his eventual position as president, CEO & chairman of DuPont Canada.
That's not easily dismissed.
Here's what I came up with:
To become a balanced, thoughtful & serene person, so that I may always approach life and people with care and respect, and through doing so become a model of goodwill for those around me. I will do this by:
- focusing on the timeless joys of friends, family, food, music and literature, rather than modern distractions,
- living a healthy, active life and maintaining a high level of personal fitness,
- appreciating the enlightening & liberating value of hard work, instead of working for compensation & recognition, and
- sharing experiences through listening, leadership and honest discussion.
While much accessory thought was involved, exegesis of one's own writing is the height of vanity, so it must stand for itself.
Carrying on from the previous post...
Though we can't simply dismiss Carl Sagan's universe-architects in Contact by saying 'a π is a π is a π,' it's still true that the task of creating a universe is inconceivable, given that we hardly understand what our universe is and how it came into being. Another inconceivable endeavour is the building of a Dyson sphere—a structure completely enclosing a star so as to capture all its radiation on the inner surface.
But of course as soon as 'inconceivable' is aired, someone's going to bring up that Princess Bride quote: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Is it possible to build a Dyson sphere? Less than a hundred years ago, it would have been inconceivable to build the International Space Station (ISS). Go back another few centuries and the Three Gorges Dam would be inconceivable. Prehistoric man would doubtlessly have regarded the Great Wall of China as a feature of the landscape, unable to believe it had been shaped by human hands.
Superficially this is an issue of technology, but another aspect is intriguing: the non-technical resources required for these 'inconceivable' projects. This dovetails neatly with one theme of a Leadership course I'm taking this term; that engineers increasingly require leadership qualities and become useless without them as the world shrinks.
Major engineering efforts are also major leadership challenges. Examining the ISS or Three Gorges, the sheer number of people involved both directly and in support (mining and refining raw materials, fabricating parts, feeding and clothing the workers, etc.) is as stunning as the products. Many large projects rely on existing structures to get their immense workforces moving in the same direction, but this isn't always possible.
Take for example the new Airbus A380, an aircraft so huge one might say it's inconceivable that it could ever leave the ground. It's been hampered by years of delays, not because it is technically infeasible, but simply because there was no existing human structure necessary to engineer a redundant and multiply-failsafe electrical system containing over 500 km of wire. Creating such a thing for the first time was bound to be problematic. The ISS has been threatened by the variable political will behind some of its member agencies. These are not issues of technology, but of its application.
Returning to Dyson spheres, consider the scale of such an enterprise. It's probable that there are not enough people (or engineers) now living to complete such a project in a millenium, even if the technology were available. Assuming (very generously) that humanity continues to grow without eliminating itself, and manages to free itself from the Earth before the heat death of the Sun, we can hypothesize that the necessary technology would, in time, become available. Complete stagnation in the sciences would probably coincide with the failure of the species.
Then wondrously consider: what sort of human structures would be required to build Dyson's sphere? How would billions of people be motivated to work on a project that might span even an extended human lifetime? To speculate on such questions is the purview of some very interesting fiction, including Frank Herbert's Dune series that I return to again and again. Religion seems to be a likely candidate structure, and that's where I ended my train of thought: it is inconceivable that 'engineering' could entail fashioning entire religions simply to ensure a project is completed.
...Isn't it?
I was trolling (in the conventional sense) through Wikipedia today, reading about the Oort cloud, cosmology, and various superstructures and -voids in the Universe.
I also read about the shape of the Universe. For anyone without a math or science background, this is should be as baffling as I found it to be at first. More easily grasped is Gauss' Theorema Egregrium, which has to to do with curved surfaces, for example the surface of the Earth. The Theorema describes a characteristic of flat maps that anyone can observe: when displaying geographical features, flat maps distort shapes, distances, or both. If you've ever noticed that Greenland appears larger than Canada on some maps, you can appreciate what this means.
More precisely, Gauss's results mean that the curvature of the Earth (or any other surface) can be determined by measuring some angles and distances on the surface, and that this determination is unique in some sense. If you draw a triangle on a curved surface, you can see that its angles do not add up to 180°. Now, the crucial point is this: the same principle applies to space. Space has a curvature which determines the relation of distances and angles within it.
I find it's best to just accept that without trying too hard to picture it.
Anyway, the 'Shape of the Universe' article discusses the ramifications of the space curvature of the Universe. If a parameter Ω is not exactly 1, then space is curved and some interesting things happen: the Pythagorean theorem (a2+b2=c2) becomes false, and the value of π varies.
This brought to mind the galactic architects of Carl Sagan's Contact and the concept of a message from God in π. Interestingly enough, that article states:
Any intelligence, working in any universe—no matter what the characteristics of its particular "space-time fabric"—must deduce the same value of π, presuming they are able to think of numbers at all, and that logic is not a property of the Cosmos.
If we're very particular, we can argue that this statement is false without the qualifier, "when Ω=1."
I seem to be pushing my usual word count, so I'll continue my thoughts in another post.
