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Global Experiences

Community Partnership

Engineers Without Borders | Carijana, Bolivia | August 2022

About the Project:

Through Engineers Without Borders, I have traveled to a remote Bolivian community, Carijana, to work on a sanitation project. To ensure that the solutions we provide them with is something that they will actually use, our chapter focuses a lot of using public health research techniques, such as focus groups, household surveys, and visual voices, to collect data on the community's beliefs and use them to design a more compatible and sustainable solution.

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My Role: Vice President; Educational Lead; Public Health Lead

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​What did I do?

  • Designed and wrote a survey based on the Health Belief Model, a social-psychological behavior change model.

  • Researched and developed questions for a focus group and a public forum to be held in the community.

  • In country, ran visual voices (a community-based participatory research method), two focus groups, a public forum, and collected household survey data.

  • After the trip, I collected and interpreted all the quantitative data in order to analyze trends and present the technical team with ideas

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Takeaways/What I Learned:

  • Experience in public health data collection

  • How to write my own experiments & surveys

  • Analyzing and interpreting non-numerical data

  • How to read technical research papers

  • Teamwork under a tight deadline

  • Experience in designing data collection methods and experiments that meet a national standard

  • Being cognizant of cultural differences

About the Program:

Empathic Global Leadership for Social Change: South Africa was course that  a hands-on introduction to solving real-world problems that affect people’s lives. In this class, we got to see firsthand how engineering decisions impact communities in South Africa. We met with leaders, engineers, and other experts to dive into the reasons behind these decisions and their effects.

 

We used empathic engineering design principles to develop solutions that are not only effective but also considerate of social and cultural contexts. By exploring what makes problem-solving approaches successful in various settings, we refined our ability to collaborate, iterate, and understand the broader impact of our solutions.

Study Abroad

Empathic Global Leadership for Social Change | South Africa | May 2024

​Scholarship Awards: â€‹

  • Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship

  • African Heritage Room Committee Scholarship

  • Cultural & Educational Exchange Fund

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​What did I do?

  • Empathic Engineering Design: Learn to approach problem-solving with empathy, considering the social and cultural contexts of engineering decisions.

  • Global Context: Explore how local, regional, national, and international approaches to problem-solving can vary and what makes them successful.

  • Collaborative Learning: Work in interdisciplinary teams to iterate through the ideation and design process, developing strategies for both broad and specific challenges.

  • Cultural and Social Awareness: Gain insights into the social and cultural factors influencing engineering decisions and their impacts.

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Takeaways/What I Learned:

  • Gain a basic understanding of the fundamental principles of empathic design to solve complex problems

  • The use of practical skills gained from observation, analysis, and ideation 

  • An appreciation of the engineering and social complexities associated with the need to ideate solutions to complex problems

  • Compare and contrast social complexities in South Africa with those of their home country 

  • Increased intercultural communication skills and sensitivity to various communities and worldviews 

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