In Order of the Engineer ceremony, graduating seniors contemplate profession’s perils, and pledge to practice integrity
By Patrick L. Kennedy
A bridge collapse killing 75 workers. A pair of plane crashes killing hundreds of passengers. A hull implosion sending a submersible to the sea floor, entombing the vessel’s lifeless owner and crew. All the results of design flaws, miscalculations, and errors in judgement.
Such sobering thoughts sound tough to entertain amidst the celebrations of Senior Week. And yet, on Friday, May 15, the day before the Boston University College of Engineering baccalaureate convocation, nearly 350 members of the Class of 2026 gathered voluntarily in a lecture hall to hear about these horrific failures, and to take a solemn pledge to prevent similar tragedies in their careers as professional engineers.
This pledge, called the Obligation, is the creed of the Order of the Engineer. Initiates recite the creed—similar in spirit to the Hippocratic Oath for medical school graduates—and then place a ring on the pinky of their working hand. There are no meetings of the Order beyond this initiation for graduating engineers, but the ring, made of stainless steel, serves as a lifelong reminder of the grave responsibility its wearers bear.
“The point of what we are doing here today is to recognize and remember that what you do as an engineer has an impact on society,” said College of Engineering (ENG) Dean Elise Morgan (ME, MSE, BME), “and that how you choose to conduct your professional lives will have consequences both to you and to society.”
Resisting pressure to cut corners
The Order of the Engineer was founded in 1970, and it was inspired by a Canadian order begun in 1926. “Tradition has it that the rings used in the original ceremony were fabricated from the wreckage of the catastrophic failure of the Quebec Bridge,” said Morgan, who is also the Maysarah K. Sukkar Professor of Engineering Design and Innovation. Addressing the near-capacity assemblage in Hariri 105, a theater-like, 373-seat classroom in the BU Questrom School of Business, Morgan along with Master Lecturer Professor Caleb Farny (ME) recounted details of that 1907 bridge collapse and the other disasters alluded to above, including the multiple failures of the Boeing 737 MAX passenger jet.
“A variety of competitive timing, market, and cost pressures resulted in corners being cut that ultimately compromised safety and contributed directly to the Lion Air crash of October 2018 and the Ethiopian Airlines crash of 2019,” said Farny, who is also Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs.
“We live in a very complex world, one in which mistakes and complications will happen, but you are the engineers of that world, and as such, you carry a special and exciting responsibility to commit as best as possible to the integrity of the technologies you are tasked to contribute to,” Farny told the seniors. “Many of you eventually will find yourselves in situations in which there is conflict—where you want to speak up for further data or clarification or to test alternative designs, but when doing so may mean risking something personal.
“How you handle these conflicts speaks to the essence of what this Order of the Engineer is all about.”
Ethical lapses and real-world harms
Of course, civil engineering is not one of the majors at BU ENG (although there is an aerospace concentration, and some students do work on maritime projects). So, how much relevance does the twisted steel of a bridge collapse hold as a cautionary tale for a biomedical engineer or an electrical or computer engineer?
Plenty, argued the ceremony’s guest speaker, Professor Irving Bigio (BME, ECE, Physics, Medicine). A Fellow of Optica, SPIE, and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Bigio developed a device—cleared by the FDA in 2024—that uses pulses of light to more accurately detect skin cancer. Bigio also teaches a course on ethics in engineering.
“Of all the professions one can pursue, the two that probably most directly affect the human condition are medicine and engineering,” said Bigio, who is also BME undergraduate chair. “And in doing work that spans both the pure engineering and the pure medical science fields, this obligation becomes more and more important.”
“There are ethical lapses on the part of the people who do this design work,” Bigio said. “When you look back in history, you can find out something about prejudices that were built into engineering. . . . The engineering practice can be both gender-biased and racist.”
For example, once seat belts caught on as automotive accessories in the 1950s and early 1960s, “they seemed to save lives,” Bigio said, “but whose lives were they saving? The fatality rate for male drivers went down, and it was attributable to the use of seat belts. But for women who were driving cars, the fatality rate didn’t go down.”
It turned out that in crash tests, the era’s automotive engineers, who were overwhelmingly men, were only using crash test dummies that measured six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds—dummies that were designed, in other words, to mimic the average man.
A more modern and medicine-related example that Bigio shared was the case of pulse oximeters, devices that measure blood oxygenation. During the COVID-19 crisis, as clinicians monitored patients suffering respiratory distress, pulse oximeters often gave the wrong results for dark-skinned people, it was later learned. Because of these inaccurate readings, “Black people were taken off respirators too early, and therefore, their death rate was exceedingly higher than those of white patients under the same conditions,” Bigio said. “The people who designed the pulse oximeters, their intentions were good. It just didn’t occur to them that they needed to develop a technology for a representative population.” This oversight led to real-world harms.
Maintain your voice
“These are things that you as engineers are going to be thinking about as you go forward, and that’s why you’re taking this oath today,” said Bigio. “Design your technologies to make sure they’re inclusive. Design your technologies making sure that the benefits signficantly outweigh the risks.”
Bigio went on to discuss the risk-benefit ratio of the latest technology disrupting the world, artificial intelligence (AI), and its different use cases. “Nowadays, all mammograms are first examined by an AI pattern recognition program,” Bigio said. “That helps the radiologist know where to look carefully. This has dramatically improved the early detection of breast cancer,” and the death rate for breast cancer has dropped accordingly. “And this is a case where it’s not replacing the radiologist; it’s assisting the radiologist.”
Conversely, Bigio warned against relying on “generative AI” tools such as Claude, which the professor once tried using to create a recommendation letter on short notice. The result didn’t ring true. “I looked at it and said, ‘That’s not me.’ And so I buckled down, stayed up late that night, and wrote my own letter.”
“The AI bots, they’re not you. Don’t let them become your voice,” Bigio said. “Don’t let [AI] represent you, because these ‘hallucinations’ and errors can become part of the cycle of mistakes in engineering. But worse than that, you lose your own personality and your identity.”
None but honest enterprises
Bigio concluded with an exhortation to fulfill the part of the Societal Engineer. “Conduct your lives so that when you leave this world, it’s an ever so slightly better place for your having been in it,” Bigio said.
Farny then bade the students rise and led them in reciting the Obligation. And hundreds of voices in unison asserted: “I am an Engineer. In my profession I take deep pride. To it I owe solemn obligations.
“As an Engineer, I pledge to practice integrity and fair dealing, tolerance and respect; and to uphold devotion to the standards and the dignity of my profession, conscious always that my skill carries with it the obligation to serve humanity by making the best use of the Earth’s precious wealth.
“As an Engineer, I shall participate in none but honest enterprises. When needed, my skill and knowledge shall be given without reservation for the public good. In the performance of duty and with deep fidelity to my profession, I shall give my utmost.”