White Coat, Iron Ring

In Canada, engineering graduates partake in a tradition called the Iron Ring Ceremony. Not surprisingly, we receive an iron ring to wear on the little finger of the right hand. We also swear an oath, not unlike the Hippocratic Oath. To be ethical, to be professional, to be servants of society.

I’ve always held that medicine and engineering are similar in this way. That’s why the ceremony meant a lot to me. Especially now, as we enter an era of prodigious technological advancement in both of these fields, we must be reminded that we can be “2.0” without throwing away our values.

2.0 is called that because it started from 1.0. It doesn’t lose the 1.0. It enriches it!

A few days after my ceremony, I wrote this piece for my classmates. I strongly believe that if we keep these values foremost in our minds, whether we are designing cities or designing the future of health care, then we will be okay.

This Iron Ring

By Elizabeth Han

“It seemed to Lydgate that a change in the units was the most direct mode of changing the numbers.”

George Eliot, Middlemarch

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The iron ring ceremony is supposed to be some kind of cult affair. We were discussing this. Dim lighting, robes, and secrecy. It wasn’t, by the way. It wasn’t perfect, but it was just right. If that makes sense.

This ring, this thin circlet on the little finger of my right hand, is already beginning to rust. Grads say that clear nail polish does a nice trick on that front. But this ring — it isn’t actually about the ring. Trust me — I’ve been thinking a bit about this.

When I was less than twelve, in a time when the de facto search engine of the day didn’t begin with a G, I went on dial-up internet and searched for the term “valedictorian speeches”. My favourite was by a girl who asked her audience to listen carefully to the sounds of the evening, for they were our link to the past and our key to the future. That speech has stayed with me consistently through years of formal education, even though by now I know that I will never be the valedictorian. I am not the valedictorian type. I can’t even begin to fathom being relevant to or representative of my graduating class. But that speech was so simple and so effective.

Listen carefully to the sounds of the evening: just listen.

Without giving too much of this supposedly “secret” event away, the iron ring ceremony was, in the end, an exercise in listening. The first half of the ceremony was conducted in another room and was more instruction than ceremony. And I realized that you had to listen carefully to know where to stand, what to say, what to do. Not that you would walk out of there without an iron ring if you didn’t, but like with most things in life, you get out of it what you put in.

The oath we took was written by Rudyard Kipling — famous poet, misogynist, fascist, proponent of the White Man’s Burden, and Lord knows what else. But he hit the nail right on the head with this one, and it was by listening that I realized it.

I’ve been asked many, many times what professionalism is. I think that what it ends up meaning to you should be the result of lengthy personal reflection. During the iron ring ceremony, I reflected that professionalism meant nothing at all without the whole — without the individual pledges of the people in that room. That is, we are taught that a profession consists of a self-regulating body of skilled members, but what is self-regulation? I realized that it is when each member holds himself accountable to himself and to his fellows and to his profession and to the ideals of his profession. And who are the fellows? EVERYBODY.

I’m an emotional person by nature, and I definitely teared up a bit when I noted that Kipling emphasized over and over again that I was bearing witness in the presence of “my equals and my betters”. I think that if I remember anything, if anything ever drives me, it will be the memory of my equals and my betters. There’s a collective spirit in engineering — a zeitgeist, if you will — and I would liken it to something my equals and my betters understand all too well. The zeitgeist is a vector — something with not only magnitude, but DIRECTION. And that direction is UP and BETTER.

Up and better. If we could only be so lucky in all areas of our lives, to have such spirit among us.

And this spirit is most important of all when we fall. When we forget to listen. Forget to listen earnestly to the sounds of the evening and perhaps those of the community that we serve. Yes, I admit that I screwed up a bit. I couldn’t remember for the life of me where I was supposed to put the ring for presentation. And I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t worried during the entire oath that I would forget to lay the chain down gently — that it would just smack to the ground and take with it all my dignity. I know it’s stupid, but I actually thought that. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that there were too many of us holding it to ever let the iron fall. The most it could have done was go slightly slack in one place.

Well, our forefathers were clever, I guess. They planned for a factor of safety. And that is an important lesson, as we all learned in CIV 102.

So now what?

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Next month sounds like forever away. And in terms of how much we must be prepared to change ourselves, it really is.

But the possibility that we might be professionals now. Professional livers of life, maybe. And even though failure may take its place many, many times as one of the sounds that invade our nights — that we have THIS success NOW.

That is a compelling thought.

And it makes me proud to be here with you.