January 29, 2025

The Need for Necessity

Ever since high school, I knew what my passion was; improving active modes of transportation like biking and walking, and fixing the broken fabric of our built environment. Most people would say I’m very passionate about this subject, some would say annoyingly so. Last summer, I had the chance to work for a well-respected civil engineering firm in their transportation department. By all accounts, I had landed my dream job. But by the end of that summer, I was having a crisis. I did not want to go back there. In fact, I even questioned if civil engineering was the field for me. Every Monday morning standup meeting, every ‘oh my gosh I can’t wait for Friday’ conversation, and every mention of the words ‘billable hours’ chipped away at my sizable interest for transportation until my only goal was to get through the day and repeat said goal until the weekend. Looking back, I think the reason I was so bored was because there was no sense of urgency to the work we did, just a well-diagrammed process that we repeated for every project.
Flash forward to yesterday during the first full day with TUI, where we got to talk with Arun and Aniruddha,, who are both important people in the company. What I thought was just a quick debrief turned into a three hour conversation, and I walked away from it with a completely different point of view. Arun began by asking us a question; Does the US government have an obligation to give people food if they can’t buy it themselves? We gave long-winded answers about human rights and government responsibilities, not realizing that this was a misleading question. For TUI, the answer to this question is besides the point. As an organization that touches on many different topics such as walkability, urban cleanup, accessibility, and beautification, TUI realizes that most of these issues land in the awkward empty space between the government, corporations, and the general public. They are topics that everyone cares about, but nobody wants to take responsibility for. Even if you make the argument that one of these groups (or all of them) have the responsibility to fix something, it doesn’t mean that they will. This is where TUI comes in. While everyone else is arguing about whose fault it is that an underpass is dirty and crime-ridden, TUI uses their military-style approach to clean up the space and give it a new look, all while using very little time and money to do so. He explained that the reason they were able to do the work so quickly and effectively was because they had no other option. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” he said. Instead of waiting for large funding sources to appear or for the government to shell out money to do the work that needed to be done, they just got it done themselves, innovating out of necessity along the way.
The conversation made me think about why I was so disheartened by my civil engineering internship. And although this is something that I need to sit with for a while longer before I can fully articulate why it impacted me so much, I can say this for now; A sense of urgency is vital to unlocking creativity, and even more vital in creating the sense that your work matters. Talking to Arun and Aniruddha, I could feel their conviction that, if they didn’t do the things they were doing, nobody else would. Hopefully someday I can find some sort of job that makes me feel that same sense of urgency. That same sense of “if I don’t do it, no one else will.” For now, I just have to keep looking.

By,
Amelia