Slides That Follow Your Voice: Nigerian Accent Welcome Address

Slide 1: Welcome to the Faculty of Engineering

0:17Good 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]

0:31My 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.

Slide 2: I want to appreciate your parents

0:46So. 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]

Slide 3: 412 first-year students

1:09Let me tell you what this faculty is and what it is not. It is not a place where you come so that somebody can tell you 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.

1:32The 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.

Slide 4: The bridge does not care

1:45What 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. Somebody's phone is ringing. No wahala. Answer, if that is your mother, she wants to know whether you have eaten. Tell her yes. No? Okay. Where was I. Yes. Wrong answers.

Slide 5: Wrong in public, early, and cheaply

2:20By your fourth year you will be able to hear a wrong answer in your own voice before you finish saying it. That is the skill. Everything else is in the library.

2:30Some practical things, because my secretary has given me a list and she will check. The, first thing, the lab, let me see, the list says... 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]

Slide 6: Practical things, from my secretary

2:54He 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.

3:13Second, 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.

3:25I 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] My wife says it is a strange thing to keep. She is a lawyer. They keep 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.

Slide 7: "This beam has folded in half"

4:09I 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]

4:20Welcome. Work hard, sleep sometimes, and check the units before you submit. God bless you all, and good luck with the cafeteria.