Who Are We?

Back in frosh week, you would shout something about 40 beers, rum and not giving a damn. We are the engineers. I would really trust these people to build my bridges, design my cars, airplanes and nuclear missile guidance systems.

Somehow, as a frosh, you got the illusion that your specific discipline of engineering is the best in the world, especially because you are at Waterloo.

You might joke with you friends in other disciplines that theirs is useless and that the one you are taking it does that plus more. The discipline that you are enrolled in is the only one that matters citing such convincing reasons as "Everything is " whether is mechanical, electrical, chemical or whatever discipline. The world is all of them. We need every single type of engineer. Even such broad based disciplines such as Systems Design or Engineering Science cannot replace every type of engineering. There is simply too much engineering knowledge in the world to pack into a single discipline.

So you might accept the notion that your engineering discipline is the not the only one needed in the world. But there are still some poor souls who think that engineering is the only profession in the world. I have some shocking news for you. Engineers do not rule the world. They never will. We still need the physicists to do some pure research, the mathematicians to come up with new and easier techniques for solving problems. Logarithms and complex numbers may have been useless when they were invented, but they sure are useful in solving real world problems today. Same goes for electromagnetic waves. What use were they 100 years ago? Today, wireless communication using electromagnetic waves is one of the fastest growing industries. If in fact engineers did rule the world, the world would be a very boring place indeed.

Okay, but Waterloo is still the best university in Canada you may still say. Perhaps for undergraduate studies in Math, Computer Science and Engineering but after you graduate, employers don't care what university you come from. Engineers from Toronto are just as competent as engineers from Waterloo. In the end what matters is how well you do your job, not from what school you graduated from.

We are the engineers. Be proud about being an engineer, not about being better than everyone else.