Textile Engineering is Real Engineering

I've been giving a course on giving scientific talks in English this semester, mostly to my media and computing students, but others were allowed to register. I have an industrial engineer, a textile engineer and a museologist in the course. The industrial engineer had kind of ignored the textile engineer all semester (she was a woman, and that was just clothing).

Today they had 30 minutes to prepare and give a 5 minute talk without using Powerpoint, and she chose to explain how weaving worked. She did a great job of drawing a 3D loom on the board, I helped her look up all these crazy words like warp and weave and twill and heddle and shuttle to explain the parts.

When giving feedback he was quite in awe - he actually suggested that she could change her study program to industrial engineering if she was so good at drawing a machine in 3D and explaining it like that. I just smiled, 'cause I think someone realized today that textile engineering is just as much a real engineering discipline as all the others.