A Growth Mindset in Engineering

This article is the text from a graduation address I gave for the University of Minnesota's Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo-Engineering in May 2021. I intended to highlight a.) how important civil engineering (broadly defined, including environmental and geo-) is as a profession and b.) how to make progress in the face of uncertainty and adversity. I hope you enjoy it!

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You just graduated from college!? Congratulations.? I know that I’m biased, but you picked a great field to be in.? It’s easy to love your job when you do something meaningful and challenging.?

Civil engineers build stuff that people need. And as civil engineers, you will never have to question your broader value to the world.? There is no future without structures, transportation, sanitation, and sustainable energy solutions.? There is no future without civil engineers.? Civil engineering is vital. It’s not glamorous at times.? I know - I’m a wastewater engineer.? No one gets revved up to spend money taking care of their crap - literal or figurative. But modern life depends on this every minute of every day.? Much like the infrastructure we build, you should strive to be reliable and resilient.?Some of the techniques and methods in our business have been around for decades. ? But it’s not all set in stone - or concrete. There are a lot of important and fascinating problems to solve today.? You.? will come up with innovative new ways to build more sustainable and reliable infrastructure, to detect potential failures before they happen, to keep our water clean with lower energy impacts.? Civil engineering is inspiring.

Your education thus far has prepared you for what you need to know to start changing the world.? But your education will never be finished, and the way forward will not always be clear.?

My second year of graduate school was really hard.? I’d spent most of my young adult life until then being pretty good at stuff and being afraid of messing up or looking dumb.? Now for my research, my project was only vaguely defined, and nobody could show me the steps, because no one knew them.? I struggled to figure out what to do on a day-to-day basis.? I spent months paralyzed by ambiguity, agonizing over the fact that I had no idea what to do.? It took a lot of messing up and feeling dumb before I started to feel comfortable with uncertainty. But sometimes, that’s what progress feels like.

I polled some co-workers about their top recommendation for graduating seniors, and over half of them said the most important thing is keeping a growth mindset:?

• A growth mindset means that you are constantly seeking to learn and become better.? It starts by asking questions and asking for help when you need it.?
• This means asking the people around you for feedback and being open enough to listen and change yourself for the better.
• It means learning from those around you, not just those with college degrees, but also contractors, utility workers, and community members.
• It means giving yourself the freedom to make mistakes, because that is when you will learn the most.? (And you have amazing co-workers who will catch your mistakes in your organizations’ well-defined review process before anything gets built).??
• Let yourself come up with ten ideas and then trash the nine of them that won’t work. This is where innovation comes from.
• Ultimately, a growth mindset is about humility. ?About never feeling like you have all the answers.

In thinking back, this is part of what I needed when I was so lost during grad school.? I felt like a failure because I was caught up in feeling stuck at the moment, rather than looking forward to the next steps and figuring stuff out.? I know that other young engineers struggle with this as well in their first five years in the workplace, grad school or no.??These days, I oscillate between feeling amazing at my job and feeling like I’m in over my head.? With a growth mindset in mind, I want to share a framework to help you keep making progress even when you have no idea what you’re doing

The first step is define your problem. When I dive into a new problem, I like to think about the information you are starting with as “Point A” and “as the desired outcome as “Point B”. The project is about getting from Point A to Point B.? But to do a good job you need to understand both of those.??

• Point A is all the information you already have or can get easily.? It might be existing site information.? Planned building requirements and usage. Traffic projections. ? For me, point A is often how much water you need to treat and what’s in it.??
• Point B can be a bit more ambiguous.? I often get people coming to me and asking - “How do I treat this type of water?”? And my first question is - “How clean do you need it to be?? Do you need to drink it?? Swim in it?? Or flush it down the toilet?” It’s critical to understand where you trying to go. That’s Point B.? If I’m going to be drinking that water, I might run it through membranes or advanced oxidation to remove nearly all the contaminants.? But it is just? going to the sewer and getting mixed in with my poop that would be a huge waste of energy and resources. Those are two very different project goals.

Sometimes you can’t see very far ahead and don’t know the endpoint of the project.? That is fine.? Just start with what you can see and keep making progress. Once you know where you are and approximately where you are going, you can start on the work. Then the fun part is figuring out how to get from A to B.

You know those multi-step exam problems, where each part builds on the answer to the previous part?? Real-world projects end up being something like those, but no one tells you what the steps are.? In fact, sometimes no one tells you what values you should use in your calculations or where to get them.? You’re going to have to figure those out too. But don’t panic.? This is the fun part.? The key here is to break it down into manageable chunks and keep making progress;? Don’t let the fact that? you have no idea what you’re doing bog you down.??

Once you have your starting and ending point, draft up some ideas that could help you get there.? Then try something.? It’s probably not going to work. That’s okay. Try something different. Ask for advice.? Each time, learn what you can from your previous mistakes.? And each time, you will become a better engineer and? get closer to the answer.?As I said earlier, this hasn’t always been my favorite part.? It’s a skill that you need to learn and practice, just like anything else.

You will discover that even if you don’t know what the final answer is, you can know what the next step is. You don’t need to be confident that you know exactly what to do, but you can still be confident that you can figure it out.

You just completed a huge accomplishment.? And you’re entering a profession that’s in high demand.? The American Society for Civil Engineers graded the state of our country’s infrastructure as a C-.? As you may know, C- is a minimum passing grade.? Wastewater gets a D+.? Which is just slightly better than the state of our roads, at a D.? Part of this is because of decreased funding and public awareness.? Infrastructure supports every aspect of our world. If we want things to continue to function, the next few decades will require a lot of catchup to rebuild our infrastructure. This is where you come in.? Civil engineering is vital.? And civil engineering is inspiring.

Your generation of engineers will need different skills than the engineers that are retiring today. You will need different skills than me. Some of these skills have not even been discovered yet. ? You will need to adapt and learn quickly, as technologies and techniques evolve.? You will need to communicate more effectively and more frequently.??

It’s going to be great.? Don’t worry about being wrong now and then, and be ready to change your mind when you learn something new. It’s ok to feel like you don’t know what you are doing.? It’s more important to get it right in the end than to be right at any given moment.? You can figure it out.??This class will go on to do great things.? It’s been an honor speaking to you today.? Congrats again on your graduation!