“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” – Nelson Mandela

This quote sums up the utility of education to society. Education helps in the growth and development of an individual and makes him or her useful for the society. A well-educated person is an asset for the society in any form of social structure. Although a specialized education is required for almost every field, the overall impact is generally the same: a person who, in their own ability, makes the world a better place.

However, one important question is, what should be the structure of the education that helps to shape a skilled individual? What are the factors which have the highest impact on education? The way I see it, education cannot be complete if it is limited in any form, be it race, religion, language or something else. One of the aims of education is to build a fair and just society, and unless education transcends all these barriers, it cannot achieve this goal.

For this reason, it is extremely important to incorporate diversity in education. Programs at NC State like the recent Diversity Education Week help to highlight the variety of ways diversity appears in the university community, as well as how the university can try to be more inclusive of people from diverse backgrounds in its educational programs.

As an engineer, diversity in education has an effect both on the learning and implementation of the knowledge that we have acquired through our education. Engineering would not have existed if science had not evolved, and if scientists from all over the world had not contributed to human knowledge the way they have.

In this sense, every engineer is indebted to diversity, which made innovations global instead of limiting them to different regions. Moreover, when I, as an engineer, am a part of a group with people from different backgrounds, I realize how there can be multiple approaches to a given problem. These approaches are generally offered by people who are quite different from each other, in terms of nationality, religion, language or a combination of these factors.

Diversity helps an individual to realize that every person, whatever their background is, is an independent entity, and must be respected as such. Unfortunately, such a realization cannot take place once a person’s thought process has been firmly established and they have become used to perceiving things in a fashion based on their stereotypes.

Hence, this understanding must be developed while one is still in their formative years, and it is an important part of understanding how people who are a product of some form of social system or hierarchy behave (or do not behave) in a fashion.

Another important aspect about diversity in education is that it helps solutions to one problem to be translated to an analogous problem from another entirely different field. For example, I am working on a research project that will enable me to apply machine learning methods to understand how genes interact.

I hope to ultimately solve farmers’ issues present in my home country by introducing more robust plants in farming. The people I am working with belong to different nationalities, and had it not been for diversity, I would probably not have this opportunity.

Diversity leads to an inclusive education, where every individual has an opportunity to grow by honing themselves in a globalized environment. This is beneficial both for the society and the individual. As engineers, we should see diversity as an opportunity to develop robust solutions which can be applied in a variety of situations and social structures, which will ultimately help us make the world a better place to live in.