March 2006 ISSUE

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President’s Notebook

Pride in our Professions
Is a Visible, Palpable Thing

BY LARRY STAPLES, P.ENG.
APEGGA President

What a great time to be a proud APEGGA President: National Engineering & Geoscience Week. In late February, together with President-Elect Dave Chalcroft, P.Eng., and several APEGGA staffers, I acted as a judge as teams from Bantrel, Fluor and Husky Energy squared off in a classic newspaper-and-masking-tape, cantilevered structure contest to kick off the week.

This was the kick-off for celebrations of the week in Calgary, at the offices of Fluor. In Edmonton, the kick-off took place at Stantec.

Lots of fun was had, and engineering ingenuity certainly came through under pressure, not to mention some impressive negotiating skills.

In Calgary we were hosted in the beautiful atrium of the Fluor building, and I learned that the company has a long tradition of anchoring professional development activities and fun events around National Engineering & Geoscience Week. What a great way to build company synergy with the national events and APEGGA publicity. Is this a “best practice” you can emulate in your company?

President-Elect Dave went on to attend the Canstruction Gala in Calgary. This is the first time this event has been held in Alberta, but it has been going for several years in various Canadian and American cities. Canstruction is a challenge in which teams from various architectural, building and engineering organizations “canstruct” sculptures using cans of food as the building blocks.
I have to confess that that my initial mental image was a pyramid of tinned peas — and how wrong I was. The teams come up with some jaw-dropping, gravity-defying sculptures of cans. See for yourself at www.canstruction.org.

After judging, the creations were “decanstructed” and the tins of food — thousands of them — were donated to the Calgary Interfaith Food Bank. The black tie gala in the evening celebrated the creativity of the teams, as well as the fun manner in which design professionals “can” give back to their community.

Pride on a Plaque
During the Edmonton Branch luncheon, one of our guests, Edmonton Sherwood Park MP Ken Epp, proposed a series of plaques for everyday, critical pieces of equipment.

By a bridge: “Thank an engineer that you didn’t have to swim across!” By a natural gas furnace: “Thank a geologist that you don’t have to chop firewood!” By a tap: “Thank an engineer that you don’t have to boil this water!”

It is great to see the enthusiasm and pride of dozens of our members during the week as they participated in fun events, science fairs, black-tie galas and so on. Wouldn’t it be great if we could exude that pride all year, and steadily raise the profile of our professions in the eyes of our neighbours and communities?

International Graduates
In my February Notebook, I outlined my reasons for believing that APEGGA has responded magnificently to the challenge of welcoming internationally educated graduates into our professions. An interesting e-mail dialogue followed with APEGGA Life Member Dr. Om Malik, P.Eng., with whom I have worked from time to time through the years and whose opinions I greatly respect.

Dr. Malik pointed out that, while APEGGA accepts the credentials of and registers 92 per cent of international applicants, a portion of these registered professionals struggle to obtain challenging work. Many of these underemployed individuals arrive on his doorstep at the University of Calgary to take a master’s degree in hope of improving their work prospects.

I continue to believe that APEGGA and the Board of Examiners have done their part very well, assessing credentials in a rigorous and fair manner, then registering qualified individuals. However, the profession as a whole — all 44,000 of us — has a couple of larger responsibilities.

First, it is our privilege to mentor along our teammates and those working under our professional supervision — just as we were mentored at various stages of our careers. Second, as one of the duties we as a profession owe our clients and the public during these heady days of hyper growth in Alberta, we must ensure that all members on our engineering and geoscience teams are used effectively and to their full potential.

The Board of Examiners has done its part. Let’s be sure that each of us is doing our part, as well, within our project teams and organizations.

As always, I invite you to share your ideas and questions with me via president@apegga.org, or to share them with all of our colleagues via a letter to The PEGG editor.