At the turn of the 20^th century, inventors dreamed of a world where technological advances were at the forefront of everyday life, allowing the masses to live, travel, and communicate at the touch of a button.  Mankind could only imagine the things that the world today takes for granted. Engineers studying at the University of Southern California in 1905 would have been amazed at the achievements of the alumni and faculty who have come since they studied here.  This is likely to be the same feeling engineers studying today will have 100 years from now, as the accomplishments of their peers result in inventions, innovations, and research that will change the way the world thinks. 

 

Engineering has developed into a field that requires both a great depth of technical knowledge and a breadth of cultural, political, and economic awareness. As globalism and free trade prosper, it becomes more desirous for an engineering degree to include classes related to internationalism, especially foreign language and international relations classes.  In fact, it is more than likely that these classes, as well as basic law and policy, will be a requirement for graduation a hundred years from now.

 

Undergraduate education will also be supplemented by technical design competitions cosponsored by industrial partners since students can use these projects to gain research experience and a more hands-on approach to engineering tasks.  However, rather than being offered only in the Viterbi School, these projects will become multidisciplinary, utilizing the talents of students from different backgrounds.  For example, architecture students will design new aesthetic components for the bridge building contest, cinema and communications students will work jointly with computer science students to improve content and design capabilities of websites.  Engineering students will offer leadership and service, having to demonstrate that they possess more than technical capabilities in a world that increasingly values communications skills, organizational abilities, and multi-tasking demands.

 

Within engineering, various areas of emphasis will have significant advances of their own, some more complex than anything we can currently imagine. New building materials and methods will allow for the construction of homes in record time and for less cost, improving construction worldwide.  Shantytowns around the world will be replaced by permanent buildings and improved sanitation, improving worldwide health and disease control.

 

Gadgets will be as popular then as they are now. Devices that function as a means of communication will be combined with GPS coordinators, medical scanners/analyzers, music players, organizers, and means of identification, eventually becoming commonplace. More realistic video games will be played in a 3-dimensional environment inside of an entire room, incorporating all senses – the smell, taste, and even feel of the objects in the game will add to current entertainment systems. These advancements, along with numerous others, will be in the hands of engineers within the next 100 years.

 

While technological advancement is important to our society, engineers will also develop a greater concern for the impacts that their creations have on the environment. Additionally, they will work to heal it just as we now work to heal the human body, finding ways to assist in nature’s repair of the ozone layer, reducing the number of natural resources which are destroyed, and making all processes more ecologically friendly.

 

Flying cars. Vacations on lunar settlements. A robot housekeeper in every home. Regenerative human limbs. A cure for all modern diseases. Clothes that can maintain the wearer’s temperature in any weather. New energy sources. A longer human lifespan. An end to world-hunger.  These predictions may seem remarkably similar to those made in the 20^th century as we entered the 21^st. In reality, humankind’s goals have changed very little from 1905 to 2005: we still seek good health and a comfortable life, enjoying the fruits of technological development brought forth by engineers.  One hundred years from now we will still have the drive to explore the world around us and worlds far away. Perhaps not all of the hopes we have for technology will come true, but dreams of advancement will remain strong motivations for engineers in the future.  And like many of the engineering accomplishments of the past, the engineers who study at the Viterbi School will undoubtedly lead the way in each of the exciting paths, which the next century will bring.