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| HEEC 2008 |
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| HEEC 2008 – Foreword by the President, EFN |
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 The Higher Education Engineering Challenge (HEEC) was launched in pursuance of one of EFN’s major visions of promoting the development the engineering profession among young Nigerians. This annual competition will challenge engineering and technology students in our universities and polytechnics to provide innovative solutions to engineering problems under a theme which is considered of vital importance to national development. Through this challenge we hope to inspire our young engineers to use their intuition and engineering knowledge to develop solutions to some of the engineering problems which impact on our national development. Our vision is that the best of our young engineers will not just look to get employment with engineering companies when they graduate, but will be look to become entrepreneurs in their own right, using the skills that they have acquired during their training and their ingenuity to develop new products and engineering systems. Nigeria is in the infancy of its technological age so opportunities abound for engineering entrepreneurs to emerge just as in Europe during the industrial revolution and in India in more recent times.
The theme of the first HEEC competition, “HEEC 2007”, was “provision of clean water supply”. The theme for this second edition of the competition, “HEEC 2008” is “Renewable Energy”. Nigeria today suffers from acute energy shortage and this challenge is inspired by the need to find sustainable solutions to this shortage. We invite our young engineers will apply their minds to this challenge and come up with innovative solutions. In doing so, they should bear in mind that the days of the intrepid inventor working alone in a dark shed is gone. Engineering products are now developed by multi-disciplinary teams and we advise our young engineers to form appropriate teams, with individuals who are able to complement each other through their specialist skills and knowledge, to tackle this challenge. They will not only be able to produce a better product, they will learn team-working and project management skills which are so invaluable in engineering today.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank our sponsors who have provided the support which makes it possible for the EFN to carry out a project like this. We would welcome new sponsors as we seek to establish a new competition at secondary school level so that we can “catch them young” since engineering is the engine of economic growth as we are seeing in China and India. Finally, I would like to pay tribute to the members of the HEEC committee and the Local Organising Committee for their great commitment and personal sacrifice which makes this challenge possible.
Remi Olatunbosun, (PhD, FIMechE, CEng)
President, EFN
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