Timothy Ekblad's key takeaway: Teamwork in engineering

"Good morning everyone, who’s excited to be here?!

Just a few months ago, I found myself in my first capstone meeting [Capstone is a project-based class that students take (usually) in their last semester in CEGE]—with some people I knew well, and some I didn’t, facing a problem with seemingly infinite solutions. We were asked to design a trash collection device for a lake in Bloomington, Minnesota. With so many ideas floating around on how to build this device, it felt like we would never narrow it down to a single solution. But that moment changed how I viewed teamwork.

Today is a big day for us graduates and our families. To the graduates—over the past few years, we’ve all worked hard to be where we are today, and we’ve learned a lot along the way. And I want to take a few minutes to talk about the greatest lesson I’ve learned during my time in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering: how to work with others.

Engineers often have a reputation for not being the most social. It is said, they like to sit in the dark crunching numbers and not talk to anyone. And while we do like crunching numbers, after what I’ve seen in this department, the social part of that [image] couldn’t be more wrong. This department builds collaboration—through class projects, through student groups, and through shared challenges.

Engineering may start with numbers, but it succeeds through conversation.

I’ve learned, from being in CEGE, that everyone brings different strengths to the table. Strengths that have allowed us to do some pretty cool things, from groundbreaking research to building a concrete canoe. But that doesn’t mean collaboration was always easy. There were those awkward moments—like not knowing anyone in your randomly assigned group. Long meetings where nobody could figure out what our capstone mentors were asking of us, and moments where it felt like we were all speaking different languages.

But we kept going. We kept asking questions. We kept disagreeing, and we kept listening.

In doing that, we learned how to work through challenges: how to compromise, adapt, and keep going when things got frustrating. That was just as important as anything we learned in class, like Bernoulli’s principle or the nightmare we call MATLAB.

It’s in those differences and disagreements that real learning happens. That’s where we start to see the problems from angles we never would have considered on our own.

If I, an environmental engineering student, never worked with civil engineering students, I would’ve never learned that there are over 25 types of concrete.

The conversations we have are crucial in an area of engineering that affects everybody—and I mean everybody. LeBron James needs roads to get to his games, and Sabrina Carpenter needs clean drinking water.

Because of the impact of our work, we rely on each other to hold us accountable—checking calculations, clarifying reports, and making sure assignments get done on time. Working together, we can have conversations about sustainability—making sure the work we do is good for both people and the planet.

So, as we go out into the world as engineers, let’s all keep growing as team members. Keep learning from others. Keep inviting new ideas. Keep holding each other accountable. And keep disagreeing with one another.

Individual minds are important—but at the end of the day, teams build bridges, deliver clean water, remediate soil, and tackle global problems.

One day, when you’re sitting in a meeting—surrounded by people who see things differently than you, working on a problem you don’t know the answer to, remember this: It’s in these environments where ideas are tested, where solutions are born, and where engineers become engineers.

Thank you to this department for teaching us how to make the world a better place. And thank you to my peers for making my experience in CEGE unforgettable."

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