Published 2026-04-24
At ITB’s Environmental Engineering student association (HMTL) graduation parade in April 2026, graduate Caitlyn Hutabarat asked a question that reached beyond celebration: progress for whom?
Amid the festivities, Caitlyn opened the address with: “Today, we did not graduate into a celebration. We graduated into a global crisis.” Rather than offering a conventional graduation message, the speech questioned how previous generations’ ideas of development had also contributed to global crises.
Caitlyn reflected that people had spent too long absorbed in figures on paper, forgetting that meaningful development should create room for many people to grow together. The speech asked who benefits from progress and whether the systems people build still leave space for empathy, concluding that “progress without conscience is never real progress”.
The question resonated with an audience whose engineering education had involved years of calculations, data, and technical solutions. It invited graduates to consider the values behind the knowledge they had acquired.
In closing, Caitlyn described the graduates not only as engineers with technical expertise, but as a generation raised by and alongside the Earth, educated to understand it, and responsible for reconsidering the meaning of progress.
The address expressed a central principle of Environmental Engineering: technical competence cannot be separated from social and ecological responsibility. Laboratory measurements and engineering decisions remain connected to people’s lives, particularly those of the most vulnerable.