Engineering students apply education to life in Guatemala

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/guatemala_group.jpg” caption=”Mcmaster students travelling to Guatemala next month, from top to bottom, left to right: Nick Copland, Sandra Dulac, Peter Wessel, Natalie Rouskov, Isabel Berger, Christa Wilson, Vanessa Kemp, Daryl Horansky, Alan Gerth, and Sarah Lawson.”]This May, 11 engineering students will apply their McMaster education to life in El Matazanos, a poor Guatemalan village where school is a privilege for its 40,000 inhabitants.

Through a program called “Society's Challenge”, students in the Engineering & Society Program will travel to Guatemala to apply the engineering knowledge they acquired at McMaster into building a one-room addition to a new high school.

“Basically what we're doing is taking inquiry to another level,” said Sarah Lawson, one of the team members traveling south. “We saw this as a way to turn the hard work of our studies into something tangible that would benefit others. Hopefully, we'll gain an experience that will influence our lives in such a way that we are committed to making positive changes for those in need in the future.”

Students will help expand a new public school that will provide education for about 600 Grades 9 to 12 students, most of whom had not had access to an education previously. In addition, the students will help outfit a new computer classroom.

Society's Challenge is a non-profit organization formed by students in the Engineering & Society Program at McMaster. The organization was formed to raise awareness and create a distinction for a group of students who are taking a new and different approach to their final year inquiry.

To date, students have raised nearly $30,000, and have acquired almost 20 full computer systems.

Students also have set up blogs that they will maintain daily while in Guatemala. Every day, students will write their daily thoughts into the online journal, which will be linked to each member's photo located at http://www.societyschallenge.org/theteam1.html.

“We are encouraging supporters to visit our Web site while we are down there so that they can read about our experience while we are going through it,” says Lawson, who adds they hope to also incorporate video clips of their work online.

The group will present their work when they return at an information session scheduled for Thursday, June 16 at 9 a.m. in Rm. JHE A114. The session is open to everyone.