You are entering the final few years of your undergraduate studies in engineering. This is not the end; to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, “it’s not even the beginning of the end but rather the end of the beginning.” At this milestone, we would like to offer some pre-graduation guidance to set you up for career success and positive impact post-graduation.
Networking is key
Try to build and sustain your network as this will pay dividends throughout your career. Networking is a key part of job searches, and a broad network will also help you in the future when you may be looking to build a business, grow in your career, learn about new opportunities, or mentor future students trying to find their way. As a first step, get to know more of your classmates. You will be surprised twenty years from now by the incredible things that they have gone on to do. Wouldn’t it have been nice to get to know Jeff Skoll, Mary Jackson, or Elsie MacGill when they were students and to now be able count them among your network? Or imagine if Julie Payette or Elijah McCoy was your professor or TA, wouldn’t you have wanted to develop active connections and maintain a network with them?
Take advantage of where you are
Try to experience all that campus life has to offer. Getting involved in a club, sport, or design- team is a great way to meet more people and expand your network, enrich your learning, and help you push your boundaries. If you have ever wondered what it would be like to try a new sport or sing live on stage, now is the time to try. Campus life can also let you interact with people of diverse backgrounds so that you can expand your perspectives and grow your ability to have enriching or challenging conversations. This is also a great opportunity to find community with those who share interests and experiences in ways you hadn’t considered before. Your time at university provides you with a safe “practice field” for the real game of life, so take full advantage of it.
Go beyond the facts
Engineering education focusses heavily on the instruction of technical knowledge. However, your success after graduation will also depend a lot on how well you work with people. Everything you do, whether it’s working at a large multinational company or founding your own start-up will involve successful interactions with other people. Select elective courses over the next two years to acquire the enabling breadth that will multiply the benefits of your technical depth. Where possible, aim to apply your learning in team projects, whether through in-class applications, co-curricular opportunities, or cooperative education (co-op) opportunities. These experiences will help you develop key competencies such as communication, effective collaboration through teamwork, leadership, and learning how to learn that will enhance your success post graduation.
Get to know who you are and who you want to be. You may still be still working to refine your identity in a way that unites who you are at home, at school, and within your cultural community. A useful step towards this is creating a personal vision statement that brings together your strengths, passions, and values, and places them within the context of the needs of society. This is just one first step towards personal leadership; here are some resources from the University of Toronto for other steps to grow yourself as a leader.
Learn how to learn
Pay more attention to how, not just what, you learn over the next two years. Make learning how to learn your primary motivation, rather than learning to “earn” grades or learning from a fear of failing. Grades will be forgotten soon after you graduate but learning will continue for the rest of your life. As the pace of technological and societal change accelerates over the coming decades, individuals and organisations that can learn the quickest will be the most successful. Not only will your learning be lifelong after graduate but it should also be lifewide so that you can transfer your knowledge to everything you do and experience, to develop your identity as an engineer.
Being aware of your learning is called “metacognition”, which involves recognising what you need to learn, monitoring how you learn it, and then self-evaluating how well you learn it. Learning things in a way that you retain and can apply the knowledge long-term, or connect it to experiences beyond your courses, is hard work and a different process than cramming information into your short-term memory, only to see it gone a few days later. One tip for converting short term knowledge into applicable, long-term memory is to try to understand what you learn sufficiently to feel comfortable teaching it to someone else.
Make the most of your present to prepare for your future
To bring this back to where we started, graduating in a few years will just be the end of the beginning of your career. How you take advantage of the one or two years of undergraduate studies you have left can put you on a different career trajectory. We encourage you to make the most of it, as this will provide the foundation for the incredible contributions that you will make over the rest of your life journey, and the significant impact you will have in society as a future engineer.
Greg Evans PhD, P.Eng, FCEEA, FCAE, FAAAS, is an engineering professor at the University of Toronto and the Director of the Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice.
D’Andre Wilson-Ihejirika, P.Eng, PMP is a doctoral candidate in engineering education in UofT’s Collaborative Specialization in Engineering Education, studying the career pathways of Black engineering graduates. She is also the Executive Director of Work Integrated Learning at Calgary Economic Development, leading the TalentED YYC Initiative, as well as an Executive Board Member for BrainSTEM Alliance and the LearningCITY Collective, and sits as co-chair of the EDI SIG for the Canadian Engineering Education Association.