Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
Every spring, as engineering students across Canada prepare to receive their Iron Rings, I find myself back in a drafty hall at McGill in 1982, holding a length of cold cast-iron chain in my hands. I stood shoulder to shoulder with classmates whose certainty I quietly borrowed. The chain smelled faintly of oil. When we lifted it together, it sagged heavily between us, far heavier than the moment seemed to require. It was as though the weight itself was trying to teach us something before we understood what we were promising.
The chain stretched down the aisle, linking us physically as we recited the Obligation of the Calling of an Engineer. When it was over, my father, an engineer himself, stepped forward and placed the Iron Ring on the pinky of my working hand. His fingers were steady. Mine were not.
The ceremony was spare, almost austere. Its origins were anything but. It was conceived after the collapse of the Quebec Bridge in 1907, a failure of judgment and oversight that killed 75 construction workers and stunned the country. The Obligation was an answer to that tragedy: a promise that responsibility would not end where convenience began.
At 21, I could recite the words without fully understanding them. Still, a few lines lodged themselves somewhere quiet and persistent: Not henceforward suffer or pass, or be privy to the passing of, bad workmanship or faulty material… And, in the hour of my temptations, weakness and weariness, may the memory of this obligation return to aid, comfort and restrain.
I had no idea then how often these words would come back to me.
Within months of graduating, I landed my first engineering job, and within months more, I lost it in the recession. One day, I was an engineer with a desk, drawings and a future that felt linear. The next day I was packing a box and carrying it out into uncertainty, trying to understand how something I had worked so carefully toward could disappear so quietly. The confidence I had carried into that hall at McGill evaporated. What remained was the ring.
My path bent in a direction I hadn’t anticipated: dentistry. It wasn’t a lifelong plan or childhood calling. It was an opening, and then, slowly, a fit. The Iron Ring stayed on my finger as I traded drafting tables for dental instruments.
Patients noticed it almost immediately. They’d glance at the rough, unpolished band on the pinky finger of my working hand and ask, “Are you an engineer?”
“Yes,” I’d say, surprised they recognized it at all.
“And you’re a dentist?” they’d continue. “How did that happen?”
“It’s a long story,” I’d reply.
For years, that answer was enough. Until it wasn’t.
Not long after I began practising, a patient, came in with a dislodged bridge I had placed less than a year earlier. It would have been easy to patch it temporarily, offer a quick fix and move on. She even asked for “the fastest solution.”
As I looked more closely, the words from that ceremony surfaced with surprising clarity: Not suffer or pass bad workmanship.
The right solution was a complete redo, at my expense. Slower. More complicated. Inconvenient for both of us. As I explained this, my Iron Ring tapped lightly against the dental mirror. A small sound. Barely noticeable. Unmistakable.
“That’s the hard way,” she said.
“It is,” I replied. “But it’s the right way.”
Only later did I understand what had happened in that moment. The Iron Ring had followed me into a profession it was never designed for, and still found work to do. It reminded me that professional privilege carries an asymmetry: I see what my patient cannot. She trusts me not to use that imbalance to my advantage simply because no one is watching.
The ring itself carries that lesson. It is intentionally unpolished, deliberately imperfect. In the ceremony’s final act, it is placed onto the pinky finger of the graduate’s working hand not as decoration, but as an interruption. A reminder that pride has no place where public well-being is concerned.
People still ask why I wear the ring when I no longer practise engineering. My answer has changed over the years. At first, I said it was sentimental. Then, that it reminded me of my education. Now, all these years later, I think it’s simpler.
It reminds me who I promised to be when I was young and unsure, and who I still hope to be when the temptation to cut corners appears.
This year marks the 101st anniversary of the Calling of an Engineer Ceremony. When I imagine students lifting that chain for the first time this April, I hope they feel its weight not as a burden, but as a grounding.
Patients still notice the ring. Sometimes, when I’m adjusting a light or holding an instrument, one will point to it and ask, “What’s that about?”
I smile because after four decades, I finally know how to answer.
“It’s a reminder,” I tell them, “that some promises don’t belong to one profession.”
Then I go back to work with a quiet tap of my Iron Ring against my steel surgical instruments.
Ben Balevi lives in Vancouver.