Meet Your Well-Balanced Inner Engineer

There's an engineer in all of us. But I will come back to that. Amidst the fervor of the presidential primaries, this is the time to draw distinctions, prop up mirror opposites, and generally revel in the uniqueness of our internal attributes.

And unique engineers are. For the 13 percent of the campus that they comprise, they certainly wear their minority status well-replete with trademark horn-rimmed glasses, mismatched socks hastily changed during hour six of an all-nighter, and the ageless look of Jolt-tinged tiredness on their face. Of course, this is just the stereotypical specimen. Chances are that you'll encounter Greek womyn and men, six-foot-five rugby players and politicos that study engineering. And if that happens to you, take heed. My beer money is on there existing a point-for-point correspondence between these individuals and scholarship chairmanships, in-depth analyses of the angular momentum needed to bypass several Stanfordites on the way to victory, and a fatalistic fascination with delegate counts over such intangibles as charisma and experience.

While the sociologists and political scientists among us express themselves through the language of ethos, pathos and logos, engineers write in numbers. Calculus and linear algebra are their modus operandi. Programs such as MATLAB, LabView, and SolidWorks also serve as nice tools, but rule over the hapless engineer who cannot debug a line of code.

The dichotomy is clear. The humanists at Cal stare for hours at a blank screen, fretting that no word will be good enough to get them into law school. The engineers have a more direct approach: They plod through every problem in a set and immediately start to wonder if they need a cranial RAM upgrade. By the eleventh hour, neither sort has made any progress towards the ever-looming deadline.

The geographic boundaries are drawn like lines in the sand. I silently nod in secret jealousy when fellow seniors ask me if Etcheverry and Soda are "those buildings that aren't even on campus." I admire those friends of mine who dare to venture past the demilitarized zone of North Gate to the far reaches of the world where time ends and an engineer's life begins. Only when the center of culture, dance, and the occasional performance of Stoney begins to die down on the Southside do the labs begin their macabre dance. Peak hours are approximately 3 a.m. (with a margin of error of plus or minus 13 seconds), when curses and chalk are thrown at computers and dark jokes make it slightly more bearable to traverse that horrid-looking Laplacian.

But enough of that maudlin autobiography. I maintain that there is more that brings us together than tears us apart. Walk around the silent desperation of the engineering library and ask a random sample of 30 engineers why they chose their major. You will find a common thread: working to make life better for others. Incidentally, this is precisely what brings many non-engineers to Cal. (Disagree with that? Fine with me, but don't dare tell that to the investment banker interviewing you!)

Somehow, in the eight or nine semesters that they are here, these idealistic engineers manage to design turn-key race cars, sleek assemblies capable of achieving runs of 283 miles per gallon, and steel bridges that can withstand extremely high loads alongside even as they pursue they never-ending studies. Some go on to research the fabrication of novel nuclear power plants for the developing world. Others ingeniously contribute to the wealth of human capital and ideas stored in corporate America, start their own companies, or go abroad to help NGOs. These marks of brilliance and selflessness are not unlike those qualifying all Cal students as the best and brightest.

There is indeed an engineer in all of us. Let us embrace him or her. Yes, it is even OK to hug-on the condition that a shower has been taken in the last week.