I've never really thought much of the university where I earned my engineering degree as a place to get involved with in terms of being an alumni. I have been receiving, for the last few years, emails from the alumni association and one that arrived late last month was an invitation to the Engineering Homecoming celebrating the 50th anniversary of engineering at my university.
The event would begin with a panel of three experts discussing how the internet has become not what the original people wanted it to be. Original people: a utopian vision of peer-to-peer sharing of information. What it has become: Google, Amazon and Facebook capturing all of your private and personal information to their own benefit. Prior to the panel starting I was accosted by a guy who had graduated in 2004; he was very talkative though he had a way of talking that seemed to show that English wasn't his first language. I switched to French, and it wasn't any better, it seemed like French wasn't his first language either. It turns out his parents are from England and France, so it doesn't seem like he'd have any other language. In any case, I was patient with him and found he got an engineering job out of university doing CAD drawings for an engineering firm, be he left that after a year or two, took welding courses, then worked at a shipyard. He found this was tough as the job was often outdoors and in the winter it was very difficult. For the past few years he's been working at a mail-room at the airport. I am not certain what motivated him to attend this event.
The panel was followed by a social gathering with food and wine and a few short speeches. From the speeches I learned that adding Chemical Engineering, an imminent thing at the school, will finalize the inclusion of every known type of engineering being offered as a program. At first, Chemical engineering will be made available at the graduate level, but in a year or two, they will begin offering the undergrad degree.
There were students from aerospace engineering (the second most recent addition at the university) in the room where the reception was held after the panel discussion and it was staffed by two female and one male student. They looked so young. I managed to ask only briefly from them what it was they had in front of them, but only very short moments after that a gaggle of alumni overwhelmed their station so I stepped back. It was only later that I came up with questions I could have asked them, like 'what is a typical ratio of male/female in your classes?' (when I was in school, only about 10% were female), 'what year are you in?' (to gather how far along they are which can inform a followup question), 'what brought you to pick engineering?' (to get an understanding of motivation), 'plans for the future?' (to see how far they are looking, or how clear/unclear their path is). If I manage to get to another alumni event that has students, hopefully I'll remember some of these questions.
I started chatting with another guy who had graduated in 1984 (though he wasn't sure of the exact date) and he mentioned that he had done many of his courses at the Loyola campus. I then mentioned that while he was doing his engineering degree there, I was attending high school there, as the Loyola campus of the university was the same campus as my high school.
The cost of the event was 15$, and from that I got to listen to the panel discussion, get probably the equivalent of about six glasses of red wine, and a full meal worth of a variety of tasty hors d'ouevres. I suppose this reason alone ought to have me going back to future events; it was a bargain.
One thing that struck me was how accomplished some of these people were in terms of what the alumni have done through their careers, specifically in the engineering field. I am not one who generally compares myself to others; most of the time I don't give this any thought as it isn't helpful in anyway, accomplishes nothing and serves no real purpose. Put in a room of people who all went through roughly the same demanding training program brings such comparisons right up to the surface, giving them light. Fortunately, these thoughts were fleeting, as I know that we all have different yardsticks upon which we each measure ourselves. Their sticks are simply different from mine.
I still am not super clear on my motivation for attending _this_ time, as there have been events in the past, and for certain there will be more events in the future. Would I attend another alumni event? Time will tell.
