Everything in your life ends up in your act

An interesting line from comedian Aaron Freeman. You are all that you can do, and all that you can do is mirrored in what you create. The important point is that the wider your range of knowledge and feelings, the greater your range of imagination possibilities and the more synthetic and important your work will be. Famed bridge designer Charles Steinmetz encouraged his engineering students at Union College in Schenectady, New York, "to study Greek, Latin, history, philosophy, and other subjects offered in the Liberal Arts College. The classics open the world of art and literature to the student. A neglect of them is one of the most serious mistakes. Technical training alone is not enough to fit a man for an interesting and useful life."

The point of engineering education must be to create whole people who, through their wholeness, can focus the accumulated wisdom of human experience into patches of splendor and excellence. The nation needs engineering polymaths and pioneers who know that imagination thrives when passion joins with reason, when illusions link to reality, when intuition couples with intellect, when the heart units with the mind, when knowledge gained in one discipline opens the door to all the rest.

Robert Frost in his poem Two Tramps in Mud Time points out the greatest joy and greatest resource of the individual and of humankind, is the fusing of emotion, intellect, and purpose into one universal imagination:

But yield who will to their separation,

My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight

Only when love and need are one,

And the work is play for mortal stakes,

Is the deed ever really done

For Heaven and future's sakes.