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Lafayette’s civil engineering majors often have the opportunity to step out of the classroom and practically apply their knowledge to solve problems with extensive research and on-site teamwork.
One of those opportunities led them to a pair of rural villages in Honduras where they not only studied engineering but improved the lives of the village’s residents.
Marquis Scholar Margaret Garcia ’07 (Stamford, Conn.) and Debra Perrone ’08 (Fair Lawn, N.J.) recently presented a project led by Lafayette’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) at the fifth annual American Society for Engineering Education Global Colloquium held in Brazil.
Titled “Facilitating an undergraduate service-learning effort to provide sustainable rural infrastructure in developing countries,” the paper is co-authored by Garcia, who is the chapter leader of EWB, Sharon Jones, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and chair of A.B. engineering, and David Brandes, associate professor and acting head of civil and environmental engineering.
The paper analyzes EWB’s experiences while conducting international engineering projects in remote villages in Honduras. The paper also discusses the challenges of service learning projects and suggests management strategies to make them sustainable.
EWB’s main project for the last several years has been providing about 1,000 people in two Honduran villages with clean drinking water. The team has been designing and will eventually construct clean water distribution systems, as well as irrigation, in the villages of Lagunitas and La Fortuna in the Yoro district of central Honduras, which have never had access to safe drinking water. The professors and student teams have taken numerous trips to the work site since the project began.
Jones and Garcia completed the paper over the summer, and Brandes, who is EWB’s adviser, edited and offered suggestions for both the paper and poster presentation. Perrone and Garcia worked together to make the poster with guidance from Jones, Brandes, and several EWB members.
“In Brazil, I was able to connect with many other motivated students from around the world,” explains Garcia. “We met many graduate students and professors who were able to offer connections and advice from their experiences. It was also an opportunity to meet people with research and project interests similar to my own. I was able to get ideas for both my thesis and EWB.”
For Perrone the experience was equally significant. She helped write the grant proposal for the Environmental Protection Agency’s P3: People, Prosperity and the Planet Student Design Competition for Sustainability. The team of 16 students received national attention after receiving a $75,000 award to continue its work in Honduras.
“Presenting the paper at this global conference was very important to me,” she says. “Although there were a lot of people there who had heard of EWB, many of them were not familiar with [its sustainability].”
She adds that by presenting the platform for EWB development and management of projects, she and Garcia were able to share what they learned while finding out how other college engineering students are approaching the same issues.
Brandes is impressed with Garcia’s leadership abilities and direction for such a far-reaching project.
“Margaret has been the leader of our chapter this year, with overall management responsibility for the La Fortuna project,” he says. “She has done an outstanding job balancing her coursework, honors thesis, and chapter leadership responsibilities.”
Both Brandes and Jones note that EWB provides invaluable experience to undergraduates and allows them the opportunity to gain a broader view of their studies.
“Involvement in EWB gives students the opportunity to use their skills to help people in other cultures with basic needs such as clean water and sanitation,” he says. “The connections with people of another culture are immensely important in this kind of work, and is a prime motivator in keeping students excited and involved. The sense of responsibility and commitment that comes with this personal interaction, in many ways, drives the success of the chapter.”
“They also learned from the many other presenters – primarily faculty – who discussed engineering education innovations from a global perspective,” adds Jones. “The students benefited from learning how to put a paper together and present to a professional audience.”
This January, the team plans to begin construction and implementation of the water and sanitation system. It also will conduct focused research on what makes this type of project sustainable. They also plan to identify another village to add to the project in 2007.