Elevating Engineering: A CELC Chronicle for Unveiling Society Success, by Samantha Cooke

CELC Kickoff: From Ottawa to St. John’s

This January, I had the great honor of representing Dalhousie at the Canadian Engineering Leadership Conference (CELC). Early morning on New Year's Day, I hugged my sleepy parents goodbye in front of the Ottawa airport and pushed my cart of luggage towards St. John’s, Newfoundland. All I could think about was petting puffins, seeing icebergs, kissing cods, and my extreme unlikelihood to do anything but the latter. Once I had sipped some bitter plane coffee and finished two Biscoff cookies, my thoughts focused on the real purpose of this journey: to learn, to meet, and to bring it all home. 

As engineering students, some may say that there is a superiority complex that comes with every passed thermo class. When thinking about the organizational structure of Canada’s engineering student leadership, I believe some pride is justified. After being welcomed to CELC by a number of people including; Memorial Professors Dr. Tana Allen and Darlene Spracklin, Engineers Canada representatives Jeanette and Eileene, CFES President, CELC co-chairs, and EDI speakers, our first day’s events began with a brief overview of the hierarchy in engineering student leadership. I’d like to share it with you.

Your Advocates: Meet the Forces Representing You in Engineering

This conference is one of many put on by our national student engineering representatives in the Canadian Federation of Engineering Students (CFES). Some of the other CFES conferences a Sexton student might attend include the Canadian Engineering Competition (CEC), the Conference on Sustainability (CSE), and the Conference on Diversity in Engineering (CDE). To learn more about what CFES offers to engineering students in Canada or to investigate running for a position yourself, I highly recommend spending a few minutes on their website. 

To plan these conferences, Organizing Committees (OCs) are put together by the host university who won the bid at a previous year’s CELC. This year, CELC was hosted by Memorial University and over 200 delegates from across the nation were gathered to participate in a week of panels, round-table discussions, elections, bidding on future conferences, and patch trading (a revered engineering conference tradition). 

Regional Network: Uniting Students Nationwide

Underneath CFES are four regional councils who represent the needs of their respective member schools. As a Dalhousie student, you are represented by the Atlantic Council of Engineering Students (ACES) for which you may have seen the blue and white scarves only received from attending a national conference or winning in the Atlantic Engineering Competition. The three other regional councils include the Western Engineering Student Societies Team (WESST), the Quebec Confederation for Engineering Student Outreach (QCESO), and the Engineering Student Societies Council of Ontario (ESSCO). 

ACES plans its own annual events, some of which include the recently passed 2024 Atlantic Engineering Competition (AEC) and the upcoming annual Engineering Leadership Summit (ELS). You may have noticed that these events closely mirror their national counterparts. I highly recommend that you check out the ACES website and that if you’re interested in attending a conference in the future you open Amanda Pottie’s emails!

At CELC this year, there were three streams of panels for delegates to choose from when selecting their day’s events; Engineering Societies, Leadership, and Equitable Engineering. This “choose your own adventure” conference style was pretty exciting because it meant that each delegate could report back a unique experience to their engineering community. Personally, I jumped around based on which presentation titles sparked my interest and collected pages of notes to share. Because printing space isn’t cheap, I’ve tried to identify some of my most pertinent take-aways below. Please feel free to reach out to samantha.cooke@dal.ca if you ever want to flip through my extended cut together.

Panel Insights: Browne’s Blueprint for Engineering Success

On day two, panelist Greg Browne animated the room with his take on the “Anatomy of Successful Engineering”. Browne explained how a culture-oriented leader will better develop a cohesive, successful team than if that leader had only seen the value in each team members’ skills. As Dal students, I think we can implement Browne’s theory by choosing our design teams, project mates, conference OCs, and even our friends with a special attention to those individuals’ values. If your community is aligned in its mission, any skill can be learned along the way.

This goes for the workplace too. For those of you graduating or heading off to Co-Op soon, make sure to ask your interviewers to describe their company’s culture and how the company maintains it. The culture of a company will impact your sense of belonging, opportunity for promotion, and overall benefits. Cognizant bosses will set aside a team devoted to upholding their company’s mission statement, which often defines their culture. Before you interview, I also recommend investigating what that company’s mission statement is (it’s usually featured on their website). Make sure to align your answers on how you will contribute to this mission and therefore mesh well with the company’s culture. 

Browne’s Breakdown: Transforming Principles into Practice

In the second part of Browne’s presentation, he emphasized the power of trust in opening the door to enhanced creativity and therefore a more successful output within an organization. Browne’s three keys to building team trust are: (1) consistency; (2) expertise; and (3) relationships. As an attendee, the applicability of his insight was clear. When you remain consistent in your leadership style and ability to deliver, your teammates will trust you. 

In my opinion, if Dalhousie engineering societies can prioritize consistency in their event delivery across many years of leadership, students will rely upon our societies more. Additionally, incoming students will look forward to our established Dalhousie engineering traditions and this excitement (as well as documented event precedents) will make taking on a leadership role while balancing classes seem more manageable. Through this excitement and empowerment, we will attract a diverse personality of student leaders and consequently better represent the student body. Consistency thereby enhances our potential for creativity.

In continuation of the thought above, consistency in our engineering societies is achieved through documentation of procedure. To me, this is our way of harnessing Browne’s second key to building team trust: expertise. If our Dalhousie Undergraduate Engineering Society (DUES) can strongly recommend each discipline’s society assigning a position for documenting the steps taken to achieve a deliverable, the following incoming student leaders can avoid “reinventing the wheel”… so to speak. Documenting our expertise via transition reports, post-event reflections, and contact lists for vendors, venues, and speakers will result in new student leaders spending their already limited time on creative pursuits that improve upon what has been done in the past.

Lastly, to Browne, relationships are key. Due to the election of our societies’ student leaders, a new team is not created specifically for their compatibility. Assigning one member of each discipline society (perhaps a vice president) to be in charge of building the relationships within the team will lend to facilitating a safe space for sharing unique ideas throughout the year. Any student group on the Sexton campus (design teams, clubs, etc.) can use this team member to plan relationship-building get-togethers. These can take the form of loosely structured society work time and/or unrelated activities. Bonding moments will uncover the team’s uniting motivation for taking on a leadership role and set up the President for a better allocation of tasks based on an individual’s highlighted strengths and available time.

Looking Forward: CELC 2025 and Opportunities for Engagement

By defining our societies on their commitment to consistency, expertise, and relationships, we will cultivate an effective leadership style at Sexton that enhances the engineering student experience. CELC was an amazing opportunity to learn from experts in the field as well as from long-established student societies across Canada. They are currently implementing principles such as Browne’s, or have already done so and can prove the benefits. For someone like me, a person who more often derives joy from taking part in our Sexton societies and conversing about their continual improval than solving differential equations, CELC was the experience of a lifetime. If you feel similarly, keep an eye out for the plethora of opportunities to join the conversation at Sexton and the chance to participate in CELC 2025 next year.