The Engineer's Guide to Being Cool

I know, ridiculous. The very idea of the profserious guide to cool. Allow me however, to make some observations, standing as I do very much beyond the outside edge of anything that could be deemed cool or zeitgeist-y. My only claim in this regard is as somebody who was a teenager in the seventies I can speak confidently about just how badly 'cool' can go astray. If you wish to challenge this I can offer in defence contemporary photographs of my red glasses, pink patterned shirts and highlighted hair.

My own status then, as an icon of the slightly-crumpled-Professor-look ('its soooo Bloomsbury, darling') means I worry when I hear that we need to make science, maths and engineering 'cool for kids'. The whole point of cool is, as I understand it, that you cannot make yourself cool. You cannot, to choose a hopeless analogy, make yourself the Fonz, you have to be the Fonz. I can place in evidence some truly appalling engineering raps from which even the spirit of irony has fled in embarrassment. Nor can you be cool by association. Simply hanging out with cool kids does not make you cool.

I understand the point of wishing to be cool, I can understand why it might make engineering attractive. If however, you wish too hard, you do not get cool, rather you appear desperate, which is an unattractive quality. In engineering, the 'miserabilist' tendency - 'we are under-appreciated' - particularly when combined with a fitful puppy-dog desire to be loved, will get us nowhere, culturally and politically.

So all this being said, I sense that science, engineering and maths are actually acquiring (is that the right word?) cool. There are the distant signs of a cultural change in the air, difficult to pin down but evident nevertheless. I would suggest that this has not been the product of efforts, however well intentioned, to 'get-it'. Rather, it is about relaxing and being ourselves. When we are geeky, enthusiastic, absorbed, passionate, engaged, in all the ways scientists and engineers can be, then young people want to identify with us. When we speak confidently, with our own voices, about our subjects, we are attractive. When we do not care whether we admired or understood but engage openly on our own terms, then the cool people want to hang out with us. When we stop hiding away the real-world of engineering, with its complexities, trade-offs, approximations and rules of thumb and say honestly 'this is what we do', then we strike up new relationships.

If you think that what I am arguing for is less engagement and less communication, I have failed to make my point. Inevitably, anxiety over how we might appear to others has constrained our efforts to communicate. If we shed that anxiety we will communicate more and better. We do however, have an alternative, I think that at the bottom of my wardrobe I still have my red glasses and pink patterned shirt (the hair, alas,  is gone beyond retrieval), that, at least, should sort our 'image problem'.