Busy Busy Busy

It’s definitely busy around here nowadays. Yes schoolwork and midterms are driving me crazy, but I have lots of other things going on too. First of all, today I had a progress meeting with the DAP (Dual admissions Program)advisor to make sure I was still doing well. This goes out to all of the prospective Biomedical Engineering Majors, if you plan to be pre-med, check out the Dual Admissions Program here at UC. Once accepted into it, it guarantees you a spot in the University of Cincinnati’s College of Medicine as long as some minimum requirements are met. Believe me, these requirements are much lower than students who have to apply the normal way. This program also present several opportunites unavailable to most other students, like Physician shadowing or research.

More of fun stuff though– I’m going to Kings Island tomorrow. Living half an hour away from a theme park has its perks . Hopefully the rain will hold off for at least one day.

Also, on Sunday some of the members of the UC Martial Arts Club (including myself) are getting together to create a demo video. The club focus primarily on Taekwondo, but many members have a background in a different martial art. Its really fun, and a great stress reliever, and guess who did not gain the freshman 15! Our instructor is leaving next week for China for the 2008 Olympics, and he is going to train with the Korean olympic team. The news record just did a spotlight on this called “Kicking It Olympic Style.”

Next weekend I am volunteering at a Pet Health fair. I’m volunteering Saturday and Sunday. It should be fun and will be helpful in finishing off my service hours. Some other things I have done to volunteer preciously include volunteering at the Children’s Theater for the play “Charlie and the Chocolate factory”, going to relay for life, helping out with the girl scouts (free cookies are a good thing!), Relay for Life, and a Society of Women Engineers Outreach event called Blood and Guts!

Staying busy while on Coop

Being on coop not only means getting a break from school, but it opens your personal schedule up to where you can get back to things you may neglect during school quarters. Many of us do outdoor activities, read, play video games, and a multitude of other activities. Last year I spent a majority of my time training for my Mt. Rainier climb and vastly improving my cooking skills.

This year my main focus will be the Engineers Without Borders project in Kenya. The village (Otho Abwao) has been using a foot pump to draw work for the village of over 450 and we’re going to be providing them with a solar powered pump that can pump the maximum daily foot-pumping in about 6 hours. Just this week I finished some documents I’ve been working on the past few weeks. Over the weekends and nights after work since I got here I’ve created: a contract, specifications section, a materials schedule, and an O&M manual.

What’s really cool about my situation is that I’m one of 6 students going to our village in Kenya in a little over 6 weeks to help build and implement the system. Not to bad for someone who joined the project in late January! I am on the water storage team and was responsible for assisting in the design of two 26,000L ferrocement water tanks. Through most of last quarter my little free time was spent working on the project, although I have 3 good friends who are in all my classes so that was helpful because we knew each other.

Probably one of the hardest things for me (and many other US engineers) was getting a mindset on where the project is and how different cultures do building projects. At first a lot of my ideas were shot down because those means don’t exist in Kenya. I developed a term for our situation, TIK (This Is Kenya), which helps simplify things. What’s also in a unique situation in that we’re not taking any materials with us. So in a way some things will be field decided, which adds more fun to the project. As for the remaining members of the group I pretty much spend a good deal of time hanging out with many of them.

The whole group in EWB is a mix of all majors, engineers and non-engineers, which helps take the nerd factor of the group down I guess. If you’d like more information about the project and to see some pictures taken last year click this link. Working in a civil engineering office also helps out with projects of this type and I’m going to be sending our project around to my co-workers to get feedback and help on issues I haven’t seen. This is one of the many ways at which UC students get to use the education they’re getting (both in school and coop) to build our experience and at the same time help change a few people’s lives.