Parents, family, friends, assembled faculty….and most importantly, graduates of Mechanical Engineering:

It is a great honor to be addressing you this afternoon and I appreciate your tolerance and patience for listening, just when you thought you had heard a professor lecture for the last time.

Life is marked by important events. Some events mark a beginning: birth, the first day of school, marriage. Some events mark an end: the cleaning out of a house in preparation for moving, the last day of the fishing season, Game 7 of the World Series.

Graduation, however, is one of those very intriguing events that mark both an end and a beginning. It’s the end of classrooms, structured instruction, homework and exams. At the same time, it’s the beginning of a marvelous journey, an adventure in which you are free to pursue your dreams, your ideals and where you get to exercise your freshly buffed up mind.

Graduation is the end of instruction, but not the end of learning. Mark Twain had it right when he said, "I never let schooling interfere with my education."

This is a great time to be a young engineer. Incredible new products are being introduced at a dizzying rate. Companies are growing, Gen-Xers are driving startups and entrepreneurship.

You don’t have to wear a tie, white shirts and pocket protectors are a thing of the past and the slip-stick (for all you youngsters in the audience, that means "slide-rule") has mercifully been replaced by calculators and computers.

The unemployment rate is at an all time low with overall unemployment in the United States at 4.1 %, and in Minnesota, an unbelievable 2.7%, and it’s even lower for the engineering profession. Starting salaries are at an all-time high. In fact, I hope you go out and make lots of money --- and then donate it right back to the U.

Although this is a singularly positive time to be in engineering, I’m going to spend our brief time together discussing a trend that is beginning to concern me.

I’d like to talk about reality. Now reality doesn’t worry me, but virtual reality does. Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of virtual reality. In my lab we are conducting research on new ways of creating virtual product prototypes to reduce or eliminate the need for hardware. Exciting stuff.

But, I’m nervous because modern engineering seems to be moving slowly away from the real world and towards a virtual world dominated by computational analysis, and designs done entirely on the computer. The nuts and bolts of this virtual engineering world are computer-based simulations of electronic circuits and fluid flows and truss structures. The virtual engineering world prides itself on locating manufacturing plants so far away from company headquarters that most engineers never get to touch the product they are working on.

As engineers, we are slowly losing our ability to interact directly. Simulations and virtual worlds distance us from the real world. I worry that if us mechanical engineers lose touch with reality, who is left to retrieve it and who is left to create the next generation of advanced medical devices and smart cars that require a solid grounding in reality.

I am both excited and nervous about the dot-com world. Dot-coms are where it’s at for venture capital and IPO’s. But, the dot-com companies are by and large service oriented. A service to help you purchase textbooks. A service to deliver groceries to your door. And there is more than one dot-com service whose sole purpose is to sell domain names to other dot-coms. We are moving rapidly from a manufacturing economy to a service economy based in the virtual world, where rather than generating value through new products, we are simply moving around the value we already have.

Thirty years ago, students entering the engineering program came in with many experiences from their youth which involved direct interaction with mechanical devices. Farm kids spent their time operating and fixing machinery. Gearheads tore apart old cars. Wireheads dove into their reel-to-reel tape recorder to align the heads. Today, life moves faster, with more choices and more options. Video games have replaced mechanical entertainment devices. Cars are so reliable, they hardly ever need to be repaired. When they do, the electronic ignition and fuel injector control systems make it impossible for the mechanically curious teen to tune the engine. Consumer products are better and cheaper than ever before. They don’t break, and when they do, it is easier and less expensive to discard and purchase new, rather than to repair. Students now enter the university without childhood experiences that bring them in intimate contact with mechanical devices.

My advice? Buck the trend. Don’t be afraid to be hands-on. Don’t be afraid to take something apart. Don’t be afraid to build something.

Leonardo da Vinci is one of my personal heroes. Artist, architect, anatomist, city planner, inventor, and engineer. Much of Da Vinci’s work is preserved in his sketchbooks, including the Codex Leicester ("Les-ter") purchased by Bill Gates in 1994. Four thousand pages of remarkable, annotated drawings, designs, visual thinking, and inventions.

Da Vinci detailed the intricacies of flying machines, 400 years before the Wright brothers. He invented machines for warfare, and for excavation and for automated manufacturing. He has one sketch of a submarine, which is the the earliest known reference to underwater vehicles. Should you ever find yourself in Milan, Italy, go to the Leonardo Hall in the Science Museum where you will find a marvelous collection of wood models that help bring Leonardo’s inventions to life.

But in the hands-on sense, Da Vinci was a sham. As far as anyone knows, none of his inventions were ever built, and the modern models in the Milan museum are fake. Leonardo was not a hands-on inventor. His design sketches for the monumental Sforza Horse, bronze and three times life size, could not be built in 1500 and could not be built now. The horse is just one of the many Da Vinci creations which exist only in the mind.

Turn now to Thomas Edison, the world’s most prolific inventor. Over 1000 patents, including the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph and the motion picture projector. Edison’s legacy to modern technology is unparalleled. Da Vinci only needed his sketchbook, but what Edison needed to thrive was his lab where he tinkered, played, built and tested. Now there was a hands-on engineer.

My advice to you is to be like Edison. Be hands-on.

Take a welding or sculpture class at your local adult education center or community college. Volunteer to do an engineering workshop in your local elementary school, and build the equipment for your demo yourself. Take up woodworking or clay making. Engineers who feel comfortable in 3-dimensional arts are better engineers. Invent something, then challenge yourself to build your invention --- not just think of it, not just draw it, not just give it to the machine shop, but build it --- yourself.

Have your parents gotten you your graduation present yet? Well I have a suggestion. A car. No, not a new BMW. Rather get a one hundred dollar special from your local auto recycling center, plunk it down in your driveway and take it apart…all the way. Let your neighbors know you are hands-on. Don’t like that gift idea? Well, splurge and buy a lathe, or a desk-top milling machine or a table saw….or at least a portable circular saw or an electric drill…or even a screwdriver. Dissect things, build things, understand things.

Think you will get ahead just by knowing computers? Well, guess again. At our local high school, they offer a two-year program in computer networking, certified by Cisco Systems. You can also do it mail order. Computer networking has become the auto-mechanic school of the new millennium. If a high school student can become a skilled network manager, where does that leave you?

Well, that high school student won’t know how to operate in the real world. Won’t know how to optimize the size and weight of a robotic arm truss structure to go on the next Mars rover, and certainly won’t know that it will be challenging to weld aluminum for the prototype. But, you do know because you are grounded in reality.

Perhaps this is doing a bit of patting ourselves on the back, but I believe here in your program, Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, hands-on reality is doing quite well thank you, and you, our graduates are well versed in the real world.

As proof, one need only have walked through the Gateway Center where we held our double-header design events this week. On Tuesday we saw the results of 15 wonderful senior design projects which many of you participated in. On display was actual hardware that you designed, built and tested. A terrific combination of real-world analysis and implementation. On Wednesday, the same hall was filled with 210 computer-controlled robots built by students several years behind you in our program. Many of you went through this experience one or two years ago. Again, real hardware, designed and built by students.

And that’s only a small sample of the hands-on experiences you had in this department. Our instructional labs are real labs filled with real equipment, not virtual labs filled with computer simulations. All of you built a project in the mechanism course and many of you are active in the SAE Formula race car project, or the solar vehicle project. These are invaluable experiences. Only by building your designs can you begin to understand what works and what doesn’t, and where the ideal-world theory applies and where it does not.

I think you are now in great shape to buck the virtual trend and to keep us grounded in reality, but you have to work to keep your real-world skills sharp because the world of simulation can be very tempting.

So, go out and start your own company, go out and invent, go out and change the world in a significant – and real -- way.

Thank you for letting me share my thoughts with you on this most important occasion.

Please take time to celebrate your end, and to celebrate your beginning.

While doing so, remember this quote from Alan Kay: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Thank you.

[the end]

[W. Durfee, MechE Graduation Ceremony, May 5, 2000]