Posted on Jan. 3: Amazing students, amazing stories: Dan Olsen
[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/OlsenDan.jpg” caption=”Dan Olsen”]Three inspiring and outstanding McMaster students were featured in the December issue of the McMaster Review. This is the second of three profiles we will feature on the Daily News. It is an example of how students make the world a better place and who serve as shining examples of students as socially responsible citizens.
These are stories of inspiration, stories that give us all a reason to smile.
Dan Olsen
Age: 23
Academic Program: Civil Engineering & Management
Career goal: International Work (Sustainability)
Dan Olsen fingers a handful of photographs that have been sent to him from rural India. In one, a mother and her daughter stare wide-eyed at the camera from deep inside the shadows of their straw-roofed house. In another, the stark living conditions of the villagers in Tamal Nadu are revealed.
The pictures speak of hope and desperation. They are images that Dan Olsen has come to know and experience first hand. The fourth-year civil engineering and management student has travelled to Bolivia, Nicaragua and Mexico for the past three summers to help the underprivileged in orphanages and assist in the building of new homes.
He has a keen interest in pursuing a career in international work and he spends a good portion of his time now promoting among fellow students, friends and peers the opportunities that exist to help abroad and make a difference at the grassroots level.
Olsen was in his second year at McMaster when he first became interested in international work. He was looking, he says, for more from school than money and a job or career. His thoughts focused on the problems of the world and what he might be able to do about them.
He hooked up with an organization called Global Youth Network and spent the summer working in an orphanage in Bolivia under the leadership of Leslie Williams, a McMaster nursing student who took a group of students to Bolivia to work in an orphanage. The experience transformed Olsen.
The following summer, Olsen and Williams took a group of youths from Olsen's church in Scarborough to Nicaragua where they helped to build a house (with Habitat for Humanity). This past summer Olsen travelled to Mexico with his own group of students from McMaster.
“They teach you way more than you could ever teach them,” remarks Olsen of the people he has met and helped. “Everyone helps each other and is committed to family. I think sometimes in Canada and North America we get away from that, those values of family and helping others, and focus on other things that don't really matter.”
The tall, curly-haired Olsen admits to being more interested in the 'soft' skills of engineering rather than the more technical side. Engineering runs in his family. His father, Greg, is an engineer and his two brothers are also in engineering. (Younger brother Dave is now in his third-year chemical engineering and management at McMaster. Older brother Geoff graduated from McMaster's mechanical engineering and management program in 2001.) His mother, Laurie, is a nurse.
Helping others seems to come to him quite naturally. The president of
McMaster's student Civil Engineering Society, Olsen also belongs to
Engineers Without Borders (EWB), an organization founded by two Canadians to improve the quality of life of people in developing nations and communities by helping find appropriate technical solutions to their challenges.
Through EWB, Olsen is working with a rural development agency in India to design a rainwater harvesting system in the Nilgiris district. (The project is also his fourth-year independent study work.) The photographs of Tamal Nadu bring the water shortage problem to life. He explains that the stream that supplies the village's 22 families with water runs dry several months of the year. How can he and other engineering students at McMaster ensure there is water all year round? Can they harvest the rainwater from the straw and adobe rooftops of the villagers' homes? Do they build a rock and earth dam?
To help find a solution to the shortage, Olsen plans to apply to the
Canadian International Development Agency for a grant to enable a EWB member to work in India on the project.
He believes it's possible to make a difference as individuals and as a
society, and he believes that the North American mindset around
sustainability, the environment and humanity is due for a change. “It's important we all do our part to be socially responsible,” he says.
Looking ahead, Olsen is hoping for a career in international work. He's thinking about a master's program and expects his interest in
sustainability, nurtured under the tutelage of civil engineering professor Brian Baetz, will guide his future direction.
And he will continue to share and promote his image of a world in which everyone exercises some measure of social responsibility in their actions and activities both at home and abroad. “I know a lot of engineers who have approached me about this work and have asked what it's all about. Most people want to do something to bring about positive change in the world.”
Age: 38
Academic Program: MD Program
Career goal: Surgeon
Age: 21
Academic Program: Honours Linguistics
Career goal: Physician for Disadvantaged Populations
