Top engineering student recognized with Harvey Jordan Award

The Harvey Jordan Award is given annually to the top graduating senior in the College of Engineering--the equivalent to a valedictorian for the senior class. This year's speech by Daniel Borup was very well received, and is being posted upon request of several individuals who attended the event .

First of all, I want to thank the college for selecting me as the recipient of this award. It’s an incredible honor to address you all. This room contains an outstanding group of individuals who continue to form a part of the great tradition that is Engineering at Illinois. The College of Engineering here is a truly special community, and one that I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of for four years as an undergraduate.

As I look out in the audience, I can’t help but wonder what kind of impact this graduating class of engineering students—my class—will make in the years to come. As we move forward into industry, graduate school, and other career paths, we enter a world that, as always, has no shortage of important problems to consider. Energy. Sustainability. Healthcare. Hunger. These are major issues urgently in need of solutions: in short, grand challenges.

As engineers, we have been and always will be preparing ourselves to take on such challenges. At Illinois, we need only to look to our history for proof that this is the case. Illinois engineering graduates are Nobel laureates, entrepreneurs, industry leaders, and academic visionaries. Those who have come before us have made the world a better place through primary research, product design, technological innovation, philanthropic endeavors, and every possibility in between. So what is it that binds us all together?

To be an engineer, I feel, is to be able to see just about any problem and say with certainty “we can solve this.” As students, we’ve gained the skills and confidence to do so. We’re ready for the minute details; we’ve spent hours and nights preparing technical reports, debugging code, or soldering circuits. We’re ready to consider the big picture, too; we’ve done so as we’ve built college careers out of research, student organizations, jobs, hobbies, and even the occasional class or two. We’re ready for the abstract questions and the practical ones; we’re prepared to wrap our minds around a tricky theoretical problem as forcefully as we can wrap our hands around a physical one. No matter what approach we need to take to solve a problem, what binds us together as engineers is that we’re always ready.

It’s also our responsibility to recognize the incredible opportunity afforded to each of us. In addition to a foundation of technical knowledge, as students we’ve grown to understand that we truly can change the world. We have an opportunity to make a significant, positive impact through the things we discover, create, and fix. The confidence to do so is instilled in us by our teachers and mentors, all of whom have shown a lifelong commitment to making meaningful contributions to their fields, and we couldn’t be more thankful for that.

Likewise, we can only maximize our potential if we continue to grow in our engineering knowledge and skills long after graduating. Take John Bardeen, for example. Bardeen won his first Nobel Prize in physics before the age of 50 for his work on semiconductors and transistors. But far from resting in the satisfaction of this accomplishment, Bardeen continued to be active in research for 35 more years, and ultimately won a second Nobel Prize for the theory of superconductivity. Either of these accomplishments alone would have brought transformational change to the world, but Bardeen, through his lifelong commitment to research, contributed both. So, while today we celebrate the accomplishments of our students and alumni, we also recognize the opportunity we have to continue growing and solving grand challenges.

I’ll leave with one final thought that I hope all of you, particularly my fellow students and soon-to-be-graduates, will take to heart – a quote from the late Arnold Beckman. He said, simply, “There is no satisfactory substitute for excellence.” This philosophy drove him to make not one, but a lifetime of significant contributions to the world. With his words as our inspiration and with this amazing community as our source of support, I sincerely hope that in the years to come, each and every one of us will continue to strive towards making significant contributions of our own.
_________________________

Writer: Daniel Borup, Harvey Jordan Award Winner, Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.