How does an Engineer Move from Fixing Gears to Fixing Broken Systems?

Yeah thats me, an 18 year old in his 1st week of college. D.T.U Week-1 was an Expectation vs Reality. I joined with the plan to recreate the ‘Student of the Year’ life, but the plan quickly changed when my professor handed me a 10mm steel block and a carpenter saw. Next two days went in cutting the block in 2, went to the prof with a grin that I’m leaving, only to be given a welding gun to put the 2 pieces back together in One…

Having gone through this for 4 years, a question without fails comes up every time I introduce myself to a new stakeholder: “How does an Engineer land into Social Impact?” Though sometimes its asked in the most blunt manner “Engineering ki seat kyu barbaad krdi”

Did I Always Know this is where I’ll Land?

The above 18 year old had joined DTU with the goal to become an Automobile Engineer at Audi, something that he had been saying since 6th grade. So no, I did not know impact space would be the place where I’ll be putting my mechanical knowledge towards. In fact, after automobile engineering it wasn’t the second or even the third career track I planned. And it wasn’t even close, the trajectory finalisation moved from Automobile Engineering to the Indian Navy… Just because I joined this club where we made Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. The experience had nothing but learnings, from calculating underwater pressure to estimate depth capacity at which the AUV would crush, to rushing to Chandni Chowk at 11pm to get a new Raspberry Pi as the last one drowned. Through all of this we landed with Varuna-3.0 all set to flex its skills in the Singapore AUV Challenge. Then COVID happened. With work from home becoming the new normal, tech & product got my interest where I interned planning to pursue it as a full time role.

So where did Impact come from?

Alongside the interns what started in 2nd year, were 2 college societies for me: NSS, The Social Service Society & ASSETS, The Finance Society. As a part of NSS, I got my first hands on experience on what working in the social sector looks like. Rural Development Department is where it all started, moving to supporting Oxygen streamlining in Delhi during COVID, and Animal Welfare through Project Voice of Animals. What started as a Just to Explore application form, turned out to a vertical I started leading. The exhilaration of the work, motivated me to the 2nd club I was leading – ASSETS. We found Project Sampradda, an initiative to extend Financial Literacy drives to the people who needed it the most: Young men and women in their early 20s, who were out of school and forced to get employed for sustaining their co-dependents. I got to teach them the importance of investing Rs. 1,000 a month, and got to learn the value of Rs. 1,000 a month. Through these 4 initiatives in 2 years, the foundation layer of wanting to do meaningful work was established. What cemented the foundation, was my first in-office internship at Farmart. I joined a fancy We-Work office with a fancy intern title of “Business Strategy Intern”. In the second week, the fancy title intern who had a fancy office was on a field visit in Rohtak, meeting Farmers for the first time; Seeing first hand, the number of hours that are put into the food we eat; Seeing people spend equal hours as top MNC employees and then being exploited by unions – “bechna hai toh bech wrna sadhna toh hai hi”. Working there gave me the opportunity to solve that problem through direct farmer-buyer integrations, contributing to reduction in that exploitation, even if by 1%.

The Drive of 1%

After 3 years of these initiatives, my mind was set that impactful work is what I want to do. The drive to make someone’s life better, even if just by 1% made me skip the application for the top consulting firm, and instead to the impact consulting firm I had never heard the name of – Samagra Governance. During my time at Samagra I got to work with 2 different state governments, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. The drive of making a higher impact, for the citizens and for nations, made me switch my roles from Samagra Governance to GDi Partners. What exact work did I do in Haryana and U.P, and what am I working on right now, is something I’ll cover in subsequent editorials. Every experience had different learnings, other than one question which comes without fail:

How does an Engineer land into Social Impact?

Now, after 3 years I have an answer to this question: “Engineers are Problem Solvers, Be it fixing the fixing the problem of people not being able to drive over oceans, by building Bridges; Be it fixing the problem of people not being able to connect by building social media apps, or Be it the problem that the people of the country are not able to easily avail schemes and services that are designed for them, by Building Solutions – It’s our Forte”