Global Competency
I have enjoyed making a small positive impact outside of my own country even if I only did so from my school campus. I've traveled to Quebec, Edinburgh, London, Paris, and central Italy but have not yet taken time to go to other places and make positive change while there. I hope to do so soon and would love to engage in Peace Corps or Engineers without Borders on a bigger scale. Nonetheless, I am proud of the things I've been able to do so far.
In fall of 2021, I joined Mines Without Borders, a CSM chapter of Engineers without borders. I chose the Uganda project team, which wrapped up its water resources project from the previous year, and then became the Nicaragua Solar Team for the '21-'22 school year. A current Mines professor had a lead on an ongoing solar panel system crisis in a Nicaraguan community and helped us get started on it. We spent a couple weeks becoming familiar with the energy needs of the community, the issues they had, and the political situation.
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The community had received power when a group installed a solar panel-powered electricity system into each of the village's houses. When we got started on the project, about three years after initial installation, most of the houses had failing electricity output, due to poor installation, improper material choice, and lack of instruction on maintenance given to community members. Our goal was to diagnose the issues and causes, take into account community needs, and then design an implementable concept to provide energy.
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Mines Without Borders
As part of the team's Technical group, who worked in conjunction with our Social group, I learned about how a solar panel power system works, and then helped finds affordable parts and material. Going through documentation on previous work was important, reading the project report and also analyzing site images.
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At the end of the semester, the Nicaragua Solar team had a joint meeting with graduate students from Mines' Humanitarian Engineering program. It was the grad students' goal to learn about our tasks and potentially assist us in our work. I was glad to be able to contribute a lot to the conversation. I added most by explaining the situation of Nicaragua with proper perspective, giving light to the difficulties of the situation. I talked about my own biggest take away from global work - barriers like language and distance separation and politics. I feel that at the end of our conversation, the Humanitarian program members could see the complexity of our work, and how far our team had come up to that point. I was proud of my team, and wanted to show that, by explaining the different obstacles we had overcome already like working in engineering Spanish and staying up to date on Nicaragua's governmental situation.
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Although I would have liked to visit Nicaragua and speak with members of the community or at least interact with them, I am happy with what I was able to learn about the situation of this Nicaraguan community. I am also proud of the steps my team took to build a solution to the problem. I hope that the design gets implemented there, or in other communities with similar needs. Work like this can be adapted and translated all over the world.
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Jura Creek Debris Flood Mitigation
For the senior design capstone project, I made it on the team of my preference. The Jura Creek team's project goal is to address the issues of debris floods in the basin of Jura Creek, outside of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. In 2013, a large rain storm sent huge amounts of water through the normally dry valley. This precipitation picked up 27,000 cubic meters of loose sediment and transported it down hill towards Canadian highway 1A and the nearby Pacific Northwest railroad section. Further, the local county of Bighorn is planning on starting a multi-use development in the current span of the flood's resulting alluvial fan. Geotechnical engineering company BGC has done related work on the adjacent Exshaw creek near the town of Exshaw. Now, BGC has asked the Mines Jura Creek Capstone senior design team to propose a solution to this currently-dangerous debris flood zone and develop a method of community risk communication.
My roles as part of this team have been using my communication skills to create a website for a potential future Jura Creek community, creating digital models with my computer design abilities, and finally putting together a physical model for formal presentation of our work.
Because of our unfamiliarity with the area, we needed to put together a visual showing the scope of our project. The image on the right shows the existing debris flood site at Jura Creek's outlet, overlaid with the proposed developments (color coded according to phase division). Referencing Canadian website pages and data, we were able to identify all landmarks, including CA highway 1A, the nearby railroad, and finally the current town of Exshaw just to the west of our site. With this CAD-developed illustration, our team was able to design a suitable solution.
For the final deliverable to company BGC, I proposed our team create a website serving as a model for the future potential Jura Creek community. The big goal, teaching residents about the risks associated with living in a debris flood pain, was determined to be best accomplished with a website. Considering the future audience, a website would likely be useable, as those moving to a new development would likely have access to computers and wireless internet. If this were an old established community, the method of communication used would surely be different.
The Jura Creek website includes a basic homepage, for potential city use, and then sub sections with all relevant information on flood dangers, zones and levels of risk, and then guidance on how to handle the worst expected storm events. The geography of the area and culture of nearby societies must be considered in order for the Jura Creek team to successfully meet the goal.
I feel I learned an important skill with my final task in this whole project. Physical representation of a problem is often the best way of communicating the situation to anyone in the world, and allows for best showcasing of a fitting solution. In order to present our work to others, my loved my idea of 3D printing our site, and then adding in proposed flood mitigation feature model. The image on the right shows the first print run. I see this concept as a way of communicating engineering to anyone, of any language, and any culture. If they can see things themselves, rather than have other explain it to them, the perspective is their own. This is my big takeaway from this project - doing great engineering work, and then communicating our process clearly and straightforwardly.
