Civic Responsibility

Last Thursday I attended the fall gathering of the former HCC and ICC Engineering students who now live and work in northeastern Minnesota. I am the defacto leader of this group. All told 40 of us gathered at Zimmy's in Hibbing for socializing and dinner. I brought along 2 current ICC students, Deven and Amanda. They each spoke to the group to tell them about our current initiatives. We usually ask a guest speaker to enlighten us on some profession related topic. I contacted 4 different people without any luck. So I then invited myself to be the guest speaker. After much hemming and hawing, I agreed:)

The topic was civic responsibility. I started by asking each engineer in attendance to write down on an index card why they entered engineering. There were many repeat answers: for the money, cause I liked math and science, because Ron told me too. I actually predicted these answers before the speech while driving over. But there were 4 people who provided the answer I was looking for - "because I wanted to make a difference".

When you get to my stage in life, by this I mean past half-way in your working career, you begin to ask yourself questions like "am I making a difference?" or "when all is said and done will I be proud of what I have accomplished?". (See previous post about reflecting in solitude in the deer stand.)

As I said at the dinner Thursday night, this is a pretty easy question for me to answer. All I had to do was look around the table and there were many impressive people who, I believe, would tell me I made a difference in their lives. My profession provides this opportunity.

However, my deer stand reflecting, brought me one step further. Do my former students who are now engineers have this same opportunity to make a difference? I believe they do.

For some of us this opportunity is directly through our work. In other cases, we can use our abilities outside of work to make a difference. Things like serving on city commissions or church construction committees or any of many different places where people with our backgrounds in problem solving can be used. In fact we can also make a difference in places where our being an engineer has nothing to do with the contribution.

About five years ago I added up the number of volunteer hours I had spent coaching in Hill City. The number was over 500. I know that the number now is at least double that. Can coaching make a difference? You bet it can. In fact it led at least 12 of the people I coached straight to ICC and into careers in engineering.

TBL: The ultimate message at our dinner and in this posting is this: "We have a responsibility to our profession, our communities, and our own children to dedicate our time and talents to helping others."