Today we changed things up and spent
a day at La Universidad del Valle (UVG). This 5-year university is located in
Guatemala City, has about 3,000 students, 1,800 of which are engineers. We had
arranged a meeting with Director Carlos Esquit, the dean of electrical and
mechanical engineering to discuss the partnership of UVG with WashU. For us, a
partnership would help us ensure that our work at Roosevelt is continued and
sustainable and all in all that WUGI is successful. The schools seems to be a great fit for us (we could even start calling the program WUVGI). Esquit and Roberto Saravia, a new engineering professor who had
been a student at UVG himself, both agreed that the program would be beneficial
to all three parties. For me, this was a huge relief.
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| The start of the future WUVGI team. From the left: Dir. Esquit, Carlos Esquit, the Castillo twins, Sr. Roberto Saravia, Carolyn Arden, Kelsey Lipman, Connie Gan, Ananya Benegal |
UVG is extremely different from
WashU engineering in that it is largely technical and more time is spent
outside of the classroom working on hands-on projects than sitting in lecture
learning theory and algorithms. For
example, we were lucky enough to be given the opportunity to tour the chemical
engineering labs. This lab would be better described as a factory. It had
machines ranging from fractional distillation columns, to machinery that
manufactures biodiesel to a machine used to make Cheetos.
Their technical skills would be
very valuable in Roosevelt. Everyday the group and I come to Roosevelt and by
the end of the day we are sure to have at least a few new ideas for projects to
enhance the hospital. Esquit suggested that a good starting place would be to
create an excel file with each project we’ve come up with and the ideal number
of students needed to work on it. He said he would gladly assign students to
each project so progress would be made immediately. I am confident these
students are more than capable of helping us fulfill our goals. They also have
an incredible amount of resources on campus at their disposal including a PCB
printer. This will be particularly useful because WUGI has been working on
creating ECG simulators for the past couple of months. One of our main
roadblocks was accessing the proper equipment and space to create the
simulators, which essentially are a PCB.
We also ran into some mechatronic students who have
already expressed interest in partnering with us to support Roosevelt. We are
thrilled to be giving them a tour of Roosevelt this coming week to show them
just how much of a difference their involvement could make.
After a successful first week at Roosevelt we are
exhausted but very satisfied with our progress. We just made it to our hotel in
Tikal and are excited to “get up at the crack of dawn to further our
understanding of the history and culture of Guatemala”- Kelsey Lipman
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