In our everyday lives, we enjoy the achievements of the engineers we want to honour today every day - from the solar system on the roof to the SmartTV in the living room. We learn from this once again: Engineers are important for the present and they play a key role in shaping our future. New challenges are coming our way, for which we urgently need bright minds, new ideas and innovative applications.

We count on engineers when it comes to the effects of climate change, growing cities, artificial intelligence and much more. Therefore, it is important to make the engineering professions visible to the next generation. Politicians are also concerned about the need for skilled workers in the STEM fields.

For this reason, my department has long supported measures aimed at getting young people, especially girls, excited about STEM. In this way, we enable many different projects, e.g. a national network to promote STEM education. A positive development for the next generation of engineering professions can be seen in the higher levels of education: at ETH/EPFL, universities and universities of applied sciences, the STEM subjects have shown the strongest increase in student numbers over the last 10 years. Although women are still outnumbered in these subjects, they account for more than half of the admissions in chemistry and life sciences, and a third in construction. I am very pleased about this and it shows a development that will hopefully lead to more engineers, which will be honoured at future Engineering Days.

I would like to thank all of you for your commitment and especially the engineers for their achievements. I wish you all a successful day in which you are rightly in the spotlight.

Here is the film with German, Italian and English subtitles: YouTube https://youtu.be/RewNvAG9p34