ARTICLE: THE GHANAIAN ENGINEERING.

Popular student activist Salifu Zulifawu (Miss Zully) of  KNUST-Ghana has put together a pensive article for publication:

Engineering is simply the application of science, mathematics and technology to address real life problems. In many parts of the world we classify as developed, engineers have a major role to play, they spent time identifying problems and finding solutions to them. 

Ghana in our case has bad road network, poor sanitation, and all kind of situations which makes us consider our mother Ghana as under developed. There is a direct relation between what engineers do and what we see as development. Now the question is, don't we produce enough engineers?  We have three main universities that produce engineers in this country, we have KNUST, the university of Ghana and the university of mines and technology. What kind of education did these engineers receive? Were they trained to be able to solve our societal problems? That doesn’t connote my point that all our problems can be solve by our engineers but majority of them lies in the hands of engineers.

We as engineers have zero-tolerance for failure, we don’t always want to try new things because we are afraid of failure. We should be ready to explore and learn new things, we should be ready to build on our own, we should have the patience to learn experiments over and over again. 

Also, because we want to widen our access of education due to an increasing population, you enter our engineering departments, and realized a whole lot of students are offering programs they had no or very little passion for. Our curricula on the other hand doesn't encourage exploration and problems solving, for instance, students will have to memorize equations upon equations in other to secure the A+ and glamorous certificates, a kind of engineering system we have found ourselves.

To my fellow engineering students, before we enter the university are we interested in how much we will be paid after graduation or the sort of work available for us. Our genre of engineers are not interested in creating jobs neither to talk of solving real life problems, all we care about is our certificate for someone to employ us. It is high time we start changing the scope of our engineering system in our schools.

It would be apt to outsmart our mediocre and face the reality that, it is not everything that can be done in the classroom. Hence would be befitting to partner with NGO’s, Private Institutions and Social Entrepreneurs to create practical opportunities for we as students.

Our parents on the other hand should know and understand that, their children should first of all show interest and passion for these programs rather them pushing these children who have very little or no passion to study programs aside the monetary benefit tagged with them.

It would have been apt to put away our daily routine of importing and challenge our engineers to do more. It definitely would not be obvious that these novices will sail through smoothly. However, it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation and unending reliance on people, and truly and behold mother Ghana can become the best of what they do with their engineers. Students in engineering should psych their thinking of “engineering” to look for jobs, to “engineering” of creating jobs through solving of problems in our society.

There is a saying that scientists dream about doing great things but the engineers do them. We as engineers have a major role to play in the development train of our country Ghana.

The Author of this piece is Salifu Zulifawu. Salifu Zulifawu is a popular student activist who has bagged several awards with her intriguing Youth Reproduction Health Education Programs. She is an engineering student of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology -KNUST, the most prestigious university of West Africa.

Story by: Dachaga Batiey Roger/KNUSTTigerEye