Having been a part of the Leeds EWB society, I decided to join the EWB McMaster Chapter. A few months I heard word of National Conference, a weekend long event which has a yearly theme, this years was about promoting and sparking systemic change. This was achieved in the conference through many varying themes; from root causes of poverty to engineering and society, and from economy and sustainable development to public services and active citizenship which meant that for anyone linked to or a part of EWB there were streams and sessions that would have something you are interesting and/or passionate about.
As conference neared I became apprehensive and nervous about what to expect; 650 delegates from universities chapters, professional chapters, other organisation and speakers were about to descend on Hamilton’s conference centre and I wasn’t quite sure of what to expect.
When the weekend came around I was suddenly making my schedule “sched” for the weekend I found myself automatically selecting all of my sessions from the engineering and society stream. Many of these sessions resonated with topics that I am passionate about back home such as diversity and innovation within engineering so I was curious to see the differences and the strategies that were being discussed and proposed to overcome these issues.
The sessions that I went to focussed on how the engineering profession in Canada needs to develop and grow through innovation and encouraging more diversity. The profession both in the Canada and the UK is misrepresentative of the countries’ diversity, the stat in the UK is that only 8% of profession engineers are female; this needs to change. Many of the sessions went back to sparking and encouraging a desire for STEM (science technology engineering and maths) at a young age and there were also sessions on how to maintain and further diversity within the workplace.
Another set of sessions that I particularly enjoyed, also linked to Engineering and Society, were those run by the engineering change lab; a “think-tank” lab composed of 40 people from a variety of backgrounds including from the engineering profession, with an academic background (e.g. university deans etc), charities and professional organisations. The change lab is a real mix of people to spark change within engineering in Canada. I was really excited to attend a change lab bootcamp where we were ask how we could spark innovation in engineering in Canada and then set about in 2hrs with developing a solution. Each person within the session had time to develop their own initial idea which then presented to the group, once everyone had presented we had to form sub-groups grouping ideas together with others that we felt we could help, collaborating to modify and adapt the idea before presenting back to the larger group. It was so insightful into the change lab experience and really made me think about how processes are carried out.
I am a practical learner so the final session of my weekend was the climate change simulation where each table within a smaller conference room was a different stakeholder at a flood alleviation/prevention meeting for a set of islands in the Caribbean. We were given a specific stakeholder and asked to think like them – how would they respond? What would be their priorities? As engineers acting as the public we found it really hard to rule out more long term solutions in favour of “quick-fix” alternatives which were more preferred by the public but it made us think about realising who the project is for and who else is involved. That scenario can be applied to any situation and really brought on a good discussion.
Generally the weekend was a real insight into EWB Canada and I am excited about what my final 3 months at McMaster have to offer in terms of EWB, I am also looking forward to taking what I have learnt back to Leeds next year. The weekend was a lot of fun with wonderful people from all across EWB and I really enjoyed getting to know more people especially within the McMaster EWB Chapter.
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