Celia Desmond describes her unusual early career journey – although she loved mathematics as a high-school student, she was counselled to consider a career in nursing or teaching. She became a kindergarten teacher, earning a degree in mathematics by taking night courses. The neighbours in her apartment building were undergraduate engineering students – and she found their homework interesting. When she married and moved, there were no teaching opportunities, so she took a masters degree in systems engineering.

Electrical Engineer Guy Van Uytven describes leaving university at Ghent, Belgium, to start his first job with Schlumberger, an oil services exploration firm. He was given a ticket to fly to Lisbon the same day he was interviewed! He found his way to a hotel and, not knowing Portuguese, managed to order a chicken meal for supper. He was surprised to be served a soup that contained a chicken leg sticking up out of it – but ate it. While in Portugal, he learned to play the classical guitar, and to speak Portuguese – his fourth language.

Bruce McGibbon describes a field trial he conducted with the Canadian Armed Forces in Shilo, Manitoba. One morning, three teams of fifteen men were given hearing tests. One group was given ear muffs and ear plugs, the second only ear plugs, and the third was given no protection and ordered not to cover their ears – the standard protocol of the day. After a four-hour barrage, the men were retested: the first group had no change but two of the fifteen in the third group had permanent hearing loss. The CAF subsequently changed their protocol!

Mechanical engineer Dr. Martin Fandrich describes one of his design-build projects – a boat lift. The lift reaches under the water surface to pick up the boat and rotates it to the left or right for a forklift to take it to dry storage. The owner of a boat that was at the limit of the lift's capacity offered his vessel for a load test. Dr. Fandrich recalls "I am not a mariner – but it was a very expensive-looking boat!" Fortunately, the new lift functioned perfectly

Aeronautical engineer Dr. Gary Lindberg describes his role as Project Manager for the development of the "Shuttle attached remote manipulator system", now widely known as the Canadarm. In accordance with past practices involving joint ventures with the US National Aeronautical and Space Agency (NASA), a Memorandum of Understanding was drafted and signed by the President of the National Research Council and the Chief Administrator of NASA. When External Affairs and the US State Department found out, they said "wait a minute – that's an international treaty" and waded in.

Wind engineer Dr. Nicholas Isyumov talks about his work on the Sears Building – now the Willis Tower – in Chicago during the late '60s. It was to be the tallest building in the world, taller than New York's World Trade Center. The World Trade Center was sensitive to cross-wind dynamic excitations due to vortex shedding. The Sears Building had a more irregular shape – only two of the nine modules extended to the full building height – so vortex shedding was mitigated but significant wind-induced torques were possible. These combined drag, cross-wind, and torsional loadings eventually were codified.

Civil engineer Dr. Susan Tighe describes her work in leading a team from across Canada to develop the Pavement Management Asset Design and Management Guide for the Transportation Association of Canada. The guide represents a "crown jewel", containing the results of many laboratory projects she worked on with various graduate students and many field projects, including over 100 test sections located in Canada and internationally. Sophisticated modeling and life-cycle costing were used to develop the recommended best practices. She also briefly describes some of her 200-odd research projects.

Agricultural engineer Yves Choinière describes his work, facilitating the production of food – vegetables, forage for livestock – with a specialty in the design of farm buildings and livestock housing. His work is very diverse: it includes environmental protection and integrating a number of mechanical, control, robotic, and other systems to produce food. Every kind of food – tomatoes, potatoes, root vegetables that grow in soils, fruits – requires a unique specialized treatment. The advances of automation and robotics in agriculture, particularly over the past two decades, has been remarkable.

Geotechnical engineer Kwan Yee Lo describes his work on the intake and discharge tunnels of the Darlington Nuclear Plant, the largest nuclear power plant in Canada. He worked with a student, Dr. Ogawa from Japan, to predict the in-situ stresses and time-dependent deformations of the intake tunnel during its construction in 1983. The predicted values matched the observed values so well that, when constructing the discharge tunnel in 1985, it was deemed unnecessary to take boreholes in the lake or use extensive instrumentation, generating major cost savings. The intake tunnel cost $11.7 million, and the discharge tunnel, which is twice as long, cost $13.5 million.

Geotechnical engineer Peter Lighthall recalls the 2014 failure of the Mount Polly tailings dam in British Columbia, which released over 12 million cubic metres of water and tailings into a creek and, eventually, into pristine Quesnel Lake. This major upset for the mining industry triggered a review of all tailings dams in British Columbia – which "greatly increased the amount of available work for independent reviewers like me". The next year, in Brazil, a tailings dam failure released 40 million cubic metres of tailings that travelled 600 km down a river to the ocean, wiping out communities and destroying the environment.