Claire attends Service of Thanksgiving to celebrate The Year of Engineering

On Thursday 22nd November 2018 I attended a Service of Thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey with colleagues from CIBSE to celebrate The Year of Engineering 2018. The service was led by John Hall, Dean of Westminster and included personal testimonies from engineers about how engineering has changed their lives.

These included an inspiring and moving testimony from Roma Agrawal, Associate Director at AECOM  about how engineering has affected her life personally, from geeky joy at playing with lego to the creation of life itself via IVF. The president of the Royal Academy of Engineering Professor Dame Ann Dowling spoke about how engineers have shaped our landscape and lives and Yewande Akinola, IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year 2012 read What is an Engineer? by Varun Narayanan:

What is an engineer? Well, look around:
Our monuments are everywhere – we make
and speculate, design, create, and build,
then bridge the continents or search the stars,
bring information into every hand,
shape air and fire, sea and land – each one
an element with which we innovate,
imagining how lives might be improved.

To generate the new, the future now,
ingenious, from backgrounds of all kinds,
inventing at all ages, for all time,
with individual spirit and joined minds,
to tackle any challenge, far or near-
is what it means to be an engineer.