As an institution of Engineering education, our accomplishments line the walls of the EA 7th floor in the form of research papers/posters done by professors and, most recently, the race car that you see outside the Dean's Office and many much more. True enough they are things we ought to be proud of. BUT are they iconic? Are they archived?

Sitting in one of the PSC welcome teas during my JC days, I remembered an instance whereby an Oxford Engineering graduate who later joined the police force told us about his undergrad life in Oxford. He ran through a couple of slides showing his life in Oxford and the usual praises which scholars would give to the scholarship body and their universities. There was one picture I remember even till today. It was this building, normal cuboidal structure, with nothing much of an impressive architecture or cutting edge building technology - JUST a NORMAL plain building. Nonetheless, it occupies a part of my pictorial memory 4 years down the road. It's a building designed by the Oxford Civil Engineering students. This is heritage.

Heritage; her·it·age, (noun) - Something that is passed down from preceding generations; a tradition.

Name me an icon of NUS. Name me the heritage of NUS. Name me something which makes you so NUS...
Replace NUS with Engineering... any answers?

If nothing makes you NUS... If nothing makes you Engineering... why would you return in kind when you graduate? FAT HOPE

Perhaps, we need a heritage centre... students designed... alumni support... faculty's interest... the establishment of such a centre, regardless of how obiang it may look, is something I would be darn bloody proud of... because we would be the first in NUS... in fact the first in Singapore to do it... We cannot move on... we cannot have an identity without roots. Any great institution is heavily anchored by its tradition... its roots... its heritage. Which from those anchors, the culture develops... the belonging stems... the memories evolve...

A heritage centre for our student and cultural activities.
A heritage centre to boast to visitors of our origins (do you know when Engineering was founded in NUS?)... Our present... Our future...
A heritage centre which keeps an archive of events and milestones for the faculty.
A heritage centre which records the lives of thousands of graduates who walked through the gates of Engineering.
A heritage centre which gives every batch of freshmen more pride than the previous batch for the great tradition that was laid before him by his predecessors.
A heritage centre which belongs truly... to you and me... special to us... iconic to us...

COST: up to a million... what do you think the faculty would say... we shall see soon
What do you think?