A high-school superlative can have an influence, even 75 years later.
When my friend showed me a copy of his grandmother’s senior yearbook, I flipped through the black-and-white photos, enjoying the old fashions and easy smiles.
Among the students, a dark-haired woman stood out. She had won two superlatives: “Most Likely to Succeed” and “Best School Citizen.”
Her name was Vivian Max. Today, she would be a nonagenarian. I couldn’t help but wonder about the type of life that such a celebrated student would have lived.
With some Googling, I connected Vivian Max to her married name: Vivian Weil. Weil was a philosophy and ethics scholar who taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology for 42 years. She passed away in 2016.
Weil’s work introduced me to the field of engineering ethics, in which she is a pioneer. In her AAAS profile, she is quoted:
Most engineers work in corporate settings, Weil says, and “organizations can be daunting. Engineering students need preparation for dealing with the things that come up. You can teach ethics but, ultimately, a person is alone with his/her ideas about how to do his/her job.”
As an early-in-career engineer, I found Weil’s ideas resonant. I had just started to develop my own philosophies about contributing to complex systems. Such systems are often beyond the scope of a single person’s full understanding, and Weil’s research articulated my own appreciation for process and individual responsibility within engineering.
I read a few of her publications and profiles, which I recommend for other engineers: