Civil defense

Recently, we have had the usual crowds of prospective students coming onto campus getting tours and hearing about what Rose has to offer. Normally, I pass these high school kids off as nothing more than future freshmen, and that definitely brings a bit of joy to my day, simply because I know that these kids would love Rose no matter what they did if they were open to it. I have given prospective tours myself and it is fun to hear about what majors they are planning on studying when they get here. Excitedly, I always perked up when I heard somebody was planning to be a chemistry or chemical engineering major because I'm especially proud of my major and the professors in the Chemical Engineering Department. I never put down anybody for saying they wanted to be any other major, maybe to be polite, but more because I didn't want to discourage impressionable parents or students of something that the student feels they'd be passionate about. I had also assumed that if the students happened to talk to prospective students, regardless of major or opinions of other majors, they would be positive about their choice. I had also figured that the tensions between majors would not be so severe as to cause somebody to verbally insult somebody for their decision. I was wrong, apparently.

Civil engineers get the worst of the brunt from everybody.

During a prospective student's stay here on campus, where they were staying with a friend, they went to classes, they hung out with the student body, and they said what major they were dead-set on being when they came to Rose: a structural civil engineer. Of course, there are going to be the standard civil engineer jokes, some saying they're lazy or other rather derogatory comments, and I jokingly shrug them aside, assuring them we have a great Civil Engineering program. The last straw, though, came when somebody explicitly said to the prospective, "I'm [an electrical engineering major], which is superior to Civils in every way." I mentally was fed up with the whole situation and I've become resolute on one thing: we as a community are unappreciative of the civil engineers, but in the larger sense we are biased to the point of being bigots to people of different majors.

Elucidating on the former point, I'm finally sick and tired of civil engineers receiving the butt of every joke for no good reason. Yes, I realize that the workload appears light when compared to other engineering majors, but it is merely different, and the challenges appear at other times in their academic career. Consider what the civil engineers do with their degree: they design the buildings we inhabit, they clean and transport our water and waste, and they generally facilitate the ways we live everyday without us ever actually thinking about it. That's a heavy load that can really only be carried out by civil engineers (and in certain cases chemical and mechanical engineers), but it has to be done, or else we'd end up with a true version of hell on Earth. Simply put, civil engineers have a purpose, and we as people need civil engineers to do their job; insulting an engineer who takes the tedious care to design where we live, the roads we use to get to anywhere efficiently, and who clean the limited water we need to survive is bad karma.

Civil engineers get the worst of the brunt from everybody, but let's think about our relationships, work or otherwise, with people from different majors. I know I have insulted, on multiple occasions, software engineering and computer science majors, and have been more than overly critical of their field of study, because it's not my area of interest, but I've learned to put myself in check because of one simple fact: as a chemical engineer, I need programmers, and it is what they do best, and they need me to design the processes they need to set to algorithms within those programs. We are a community of people that, in the end, need each other to do a job right and efficiently and we can't forget that.