Teleprompter Demo: Nigerian Accent

Welcome

0:12Good morning, and welcome to the Faculty of Engineering. Please sit down, sit down. The people standing at the back, there are seats in the front, I can see them from here, and nobody has ever died from sitting in the front row. Come. [chuckles]

0:26My name is Dayo, I am the dean of this faculty, and before anything else I want to uh, appreciate your parents, some of whom are here, and some of whom are at work paying for this. You can clap for them. That is allowed.

This year's numbers

0:41So. You are four hundred and twelve this year. Last year we admitted three hundred and seventy, no, three hundred and eighty, and the year before that three hundred and sixty-one, which means the building is now full, the lifts are now full, and the queue at the cafeteria is now a matter for the civil engineering department. You will meet them. They are still working on it. [laughs]

What this faculty is

1:06Let me tell you what this faculty is and what it is not. It is not a place where you come to be told that you are brilliant. Many of you were the best student in your school, and I am very happy for you, and from Monday morning that will not matter, because the person sitting next to you was also the best student in their school, and the bridge does not care.

1:28The bridge cares whether the load path is correct. That is the whole of engineering, you see. The bridge does not care, The bridge does not care.

1:41Somebody's phone is ringing. It is okay. Answer it, if it is your mother, she wants to know if you have eaten. Tell her yes. No? Okay. Where was I. Yes. What this place is.

1:54What it is, is a place where you learn to be wrong in public, early, and cheaply. You will submit designs, and a uh, a lecturer will stand in front of sixty people and show you where it fails, and you will want the ground to open, and it will not open, and then you will go and fix it, and the next time it will fail somewhere else.

2:16By the time you are in fourth year, you will hear a wrong answer in your own mouth before you have finished saying it. That is the skill. Everything else is in the library.

Practical things

2:27Some things, some practical, let me, my secretary... Some practical things, because my secretary has given me a list and she will check. The first-year lab opens at eight. Not eight fifteen. The technician, Mr Bassey, has been here for twenty-seven years and he locks the door at eight oh five, and he has locked it on professors. [laughs]

2:49He locked me out in two thousand and eleven. I was already a professor. I knocked. He said, through the door, Prof, the time is the time. I went and had tea. He was right. I am the dean now and I have not changed the rule, because I do not want to have that conversation with Mr Bassey.

The first-semester mathematics

3:08Second, the mathematics course in the first semester is the one that determines who is still here in the second year, and I am telling you now, in September, so that nobody can say they were not told.

The dean's first year

3:21I will tell you one thing from my own first year, and then I will stop, because the Vice-Chancellor is next and he does not like to wait. In my first week, in nineteen ninety-four, I was asked to calculate the deflection of a simple beam, and I got a number that was larger than the beam. I did not notice. I submitted it. The lecturer wrote on it, in red, this beam has folded in half, please visit it in hospital. [laughs]

3:49I have kept that paper. It is in my office, framed, next to my professorship, and I look at the beam more often than I look at the certificate. [sighs] My wife says it is a strange thing to frame. She is a lawyer. They frame different things. But I tell her, every engineer in this country has a beam like that somewhere, and the honest ones keep it, and, anyway, she has stopped asking. So.

Final words

4:16Welcome. Work hard, sleep sometimes, and check the units before you submit. God bless you all, and good luck with the cafeteria.