Nick Mutchler, Plus3 Greece, Summer 2026
The most useful thing I took away from my trip to Greece didn’t come from any single company visit or lecture. It came from our tour guide, Dimitri, who had been with us since day one of the trip. The man had been too close to a hundred countries and spoke almost ten languages, so by when it was his turn to talk, we all listened.
Near the end of our time with him he brought us all to an ancient theatre at Epidavros, It was the best preserved theatre in Greece, a huge structure carved into the side of a mountain that was built thousands of years ago and still works today. You can stand in the middle of the stage, drop a coin, and someone from the top row will be able to hear it. Its true, we tested it.
Standing in the theatre, Dimitri told us, a group of engineering students, something no one was expecting to hear. He said good engineers don’t just learn how to build things, they understand why they are building them, and who they are building them for. What we didn’t know until then was the Dimitri was from this part of Greece, and he had grown up going to see plays in the very theatre we were standing in. It has been a huge part of his childhood. In a way, he said, the engineers who built it thousands of years ago had deliberately made something to last, and that he was one of the people they were ultimately building it for. Then he hammered home his final point, that we as engineers shouldn’t only be good at the technical side of things, that we should be a well-rounded person too.
That honestly caught me off guard. Over the past year I was so locked into my engineering coursework that I had developed a kind of tunnel vision onto the numbers and the technical side, so being told to care about history and the context of what we are building felt almost foreign to me. That is probably why Dimitri’s words stuck with me so well.
I still think about it, and it’s something I want to keep in mind as I get further into my degree. Rather than just asking how to make something, I want to keep asking why it needs to be built and who it is actually for.
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