Thank you very much everyone. I started civil engineering three years ago here at Imperial and it's been a hell of a ride. It's really been very enriching because I have to trust that, you know, when I graduate in a year, if there's a graduate out there that's going to be able to design a bridge that's going to work and not going to kill everyone that goes on it. It's going to be me and the people who graduate with me. And that's a really exciting prospect.
It's also a little bit daunting. And the great thing about being here and learning these things is that it's a fantastic learning curve. And it's something I truly believe in.
And so when I came into the lecture theater I've spent most of my life in, you probably all have one, lecture theater 201. I was powered by that very prospect. The prospect that every day I I was going to be adding on to this four-year learning curve, and I was going to be getting all this great new knowledge. And what happened is that I got so interested in keeping up with this process that I kind of didn't have time to look back. And so recently I thought, let's look back at what's happened over three years and see how I've grown along this really long engineering learning curve.
And the reality is that it's been a lot harder for me than I thought it would be. Because, you know, when I left home, I put all my stuff in the back of my parents'garden. and I drove to university. But when I got here, there have been instances where I felt genuinely out of place, genuinely unhappy, which was really surprising to me because engineering is what I felt I was made for. And so I decided I was going to try and understand why, why I was feeling this.
I, as you heard, I'm Franco-Australian. I went to an international school in the suburbs of Paris. And I was being taught in French and English all the time.
And I was surrounded by people who were just like me, people who were interested in lots of different things and were studying lots of different topics. topics and we were all jumping from all these different topics and all these things that we were interested in. And it's not because we had short attention spans or we all had ADHD or something.
It's just because we had a genuine interest in all of these wide variety of topics and we were encouraged to pursue them. And I fitted right into that environment. I found that was home.
And when I left high school and I came to university, I brought that model along with me. And so when I got here, you probably all know Freshers'Fair. I came to Freshers'Fair as a first year.
I was really excited. I signed up for Freshers' signed up to as many things as I could. I was getting emails left and right, and I joined lots of different clubs.
And I was really busy first year. I was having a whale of a time. And I was meeting lots of great people, but I was meeting them through the society, so I had common interests with them. And I thought that I was meeting them because we were all doing lots of different things. I actually turned out, it took me eight months to realize that not only were nobody else that I knew of doing this.
But a lot of people in my ear thought I was a little bit of a freak. I was this, I haven't heard a guy tell me that. I was this weird guy who, you know, wasn't in the right course. He wasn't supposed to be an engineer.
But, you know, he was sticking around, probably because his parents were pushing him to get a degree or something. And so as long as he was going to be here for four years, he might as well focus on doing other things than work when he could. And that really resonated with me because I was like, well, hang on, why?
And I tried talking to them and trying advocating for cultivating these other interests, and I just kept hitting a wall. And it's not that they were boring people. It's just that they wanted to do their work, and they were open to doing maybe one sporting activity, and then maybe another club as long as it wasn't too much of a hassle, not too much involvement, not too much work.
But here I was thinking that my model United Nations debating platform, which is something I'm still very active in, was as important as my finite element analysis lecture. And I was the only one to think that. And so it started getting to me, well, maybe I'm a little bit wrong. Maybe they are right.
Maybe the role of an engineer is not necessarily to be this open. Because we do have a great responsibility as engineers. When you think about it, when a surgeon makes a mistake, he kills the patient that's in front. When an engineer makes a mistake, he can kill a lot of people in one go.
And so there is that responsibility. responsibility, so maybe we should focus in, you know, making sure we have a technical base, and we never get it wrong. And so I started hitting a little bit of a low point, and wondering, you know, what I had lived so far, and what I was living here. And, you know, it was a little bit of rock bottom.
The sky was a little bit cloudy, but you know how life is. Life has a way of, you know, throwing things at you from time to time. And so I got a phone call from my dad, who had just heard about this summit.
It was taking place in Pittsburgh in the US. It was called One Young World, and it was lots of really interesting, great leaders. of this current generation, great thinkers, great speakers, who were going to talk to 1,300 young people. And these young people were selected for the work that they do all around the world. And what was going to happen is we were going to bring them together over a platform of six different topics, and it was going to be debating and sharing, and that's how you would get the new generation to start doing things.
And I was like, yep, this is for me. This is right up my alley. So I took a week off lectures in first year, which is a big thing to do, and I went to this summit. You know, this is... Actually, it's the beginning of second year now.
I'm giving my thinking one last chance. And I had an incredible time. I met 1,300 of the most creative, most hardworking, most innovative people you've ever met. Also, there were lots of great speakers.
We had President Clinton come and give the opening address. No one told me that Clinton was coming. So I just sat in the opening ceremony there, and they say at some point, please, you know, welcome Mr. Clinton.
I'm like, oh, that's funny. I know of a president who's called Clinton. And then I look up and the actual guy came up on stage. And at that point, I just kept smiling for half an hour.
My facial expression didn't change at all. And it was just him speaking. And we were all really, really encouraged and inspired that way for the entire four days of the debate.
Because these were people who saw the world in a way that I saw it. who believed in this, you know, Model UN coming together, anyone from any background, and sharing no matter what your experience is, and coming up with one resolution. And so I came back from this summit, fully engaged, and what I realized...
afterwards was that I didn't meet a single other engineer there. Not one. And so I went back to my lecture theater with all my peers who thought I was a little bit weird, convinced that I belonged in that lecture theater.
Because I came back with the belief that you're an engineer not because you have a piece of paper with a grade on it, it that says yes you have the right percentage to be an engineer. You're an engineer because you're passionate about people and you're passionate about the environment and you're passionate about bringing those together in a sustainable and durable way. And I think that's how we need to think about engineering a little bit more.
We need to make two changes to the way we think and we incorporate engineers. The first one is society needs to welcome them a little bit more because think about it, being an engineer is hard and there's also the reality that the engineers are not putting themselves out there that much. They're not that passionate about that.
And the reasoning behind it. is because the engineer is always focused on this technical background. And when you think about it, a lot of society thinks of engineering as a bubble.
I mean, if you have ever had to work with an engineer, you go and talk to him when you want to build something or you want to fix something. And then he comes in, he designs something, he builds it, and then he moves on to the next project. And there isn't much sharing there. We have a vision of engineering as this one big silo that's completely isolated.
And then the engineering professionals, they're not very good at communication. They're not used to it. to going out there and talking about their ideas because they don't feel that's their role. So we need the professionals to change that. And we also need to stop thinking about all these silos.
There isn't one engineer silo and then a marketing silo and then an economic silo. There's just society with more need for people talking within one another. And that's the big thing I want to let you all with today is we need to get rid of these silos. And so the great news is that I can attest to the fact that there's changes starting.
When I came back from One Young World the first time, I went to see my department. I convinced them to send me back a second time as an official delegate. Nice big fancy title.
And I went there and I started seeing in Johannesburg, which is where the summit was held, that there was more people from technical backgrounds coming. More people who, and even engineering companies, who were sending delegates over. And the fact that my department would be willing now, after I've come back from the summit, to send an entire delegation next year, is a sign that, yes, they've realized that this is the change that's happening and they want to incorporate it. And the fact that they're doing so and that they're...
supporting me in the process is something I'm really, really grateful for. And the reality is that these engineers, they're not used to this idea. They're not open to this idea. And when you come back and you think about all these silos, it's limiting.
What we need to do is, us as engineers, is to be more open, more approachable, more willing, more responsible for ideas, take responsibilities. Because it's not just the fact of coming up with the idea. It's also the fact of making sure that...
that it's promoted properly, making sure that it gets out into the world, making sure that that knowledge can reach as many people as possible. Because the greatest idea in an engineer's mind, you can have the smartest guy who's just, you know, in a room having his idea and working on it. But if he's all alone in that room and he's not changing anything, he's just an only guy in an empty room. There's no way that that information is getting anywhere. And so far, engineers have relied on other people to do that work for them.
But we need to change that dynamic a little bit. But there's also the reality that society needs to accept them. them more.
And so if there's something you're going to do when you leave today, try and include an engineer in something you would never have included an engineer before. Because they have incredible input. They're very creative people. They're very open.
They're just in their world. They're in their bubble still. And we need to burst that bubble open.
You know, the mentality that we all work in these different silos is an old mentality, but it's taking its sweet time to die off. And we need to help it take the final breath. And there's another piece of good news, is the fact that companies are also starting to realize this change because more and more people are graduating with degrees and there's more and more people out there and it used to be that you could tell them apart just based on academic ability and that's still the belief in most institutions but companies have all these positions that are open and they can't fill them anymore because the graduates want recognition as well and so companies are starting to look in profile a little bit more and all of a sudden that little society that I was doing on the side extra goes from being a complete waste of study time to something that sets you apart from the rest of the people and that gives you a really valuable profile. And one of the other things we need to include in what we're talking about, education of engineers, is this idea that we need to change the way we train them as well.
Because when you think about it, who according to university, I'm sure you can all relate to this, who ticks all the boxes? Who's the best guy? The guy who gets 100%, right?
The guy who's always there on time, always giving coursework, and always gets an A. I like to call these people professors in the making, because that's what they're going to end up becoming. coming.
But universities need to update their system a little bit to make sure that we take into account practical implementation skills when we assess students. Because having, again, the greatest ideas, if you just keep them to yourself, they won't be applied. These changes, I feel, are necessary. And the great thing is that engineers are open to them.
And so, you know, a lot of people have said of engineering that it's the most essential profession. It's the one profession that sustains civilization. Why then should we keep on accepting accepting it living all on its own. Let's come together and break down those silos. Thank you very much.