I’ve been teaching final year civil and environmental engineering students at Monash University. To celebrate the end of the year, I was invited to the department dinner where I sat next to Dr Dave and talked about sustainability.

‘It’s hard,’ Dave said. ‘We all want to make money.’ Dave noticed my expresion change. ‘You do want to make money, right?’ he prompted.

‘Umm, well… I have a mortgage… as long as I can pay that, then no, I don’t need to make a heap of money,’ I ventured.

Dave looked at me intently and suddenly lit up. ‘Well! If you don’t mind about money, you could go into academia! It’s such a great job, you know. You can make a real difference though teaching. Nothing is as effective as influencing people through teaching. Especially if money isn’t that important to you.’