Nearly four years ago I decided that I wanted to pursue humanitarian engineering after seeing projects college seniors in Dallas were creating for the developing world. I had no idea what the next four years would have in store for me, or if I would even still have that same passion I had discovered at Southern Methodist University. I am now one of those college seniors, and I have had many experiences at Santa Clara University that could have either further ignited that passion or totally destroyed it. The Global Social Benefit Fellowship was definitely going to be a make it or break it kind of experience for me. It was going to be not only my first time to the developing world, but also just my first time out of the country. I was going to finally be able to see a different part of the world and experience travelling and working in an unknown area. I think most people would not choose Uganda as their first place to have this travelling experience, but the extreme made me excited. I was finally going to be able to see the part of the world that I have dreamed about creating projects for since I was in high school. My fantasy was going to become a reality, which also made me nervous because what if the reason why I chose engineering was about to be shattered in just two short months.
Caroline, Ty, and I about to board the plane to go to Uganda.
Now it has been three months since I have been back from Uganda and working with BanaPads, and I can begin to fully realize how much this nine month experience has shaped me into the person I am now as I make the “big kid” decisions about what I want to do with my life. I think it was a good thing that my action research project did not go as planned; because of it, I learned a lot about my capabilities and myself. I went in thinking that I was finally going to be able to test my engineering skills and work on a technical project for an enterprise that needs me because I have the backing of an American university and the potential to create a senior design project from my experience. I soon realized that I went into Uganda way over my head and too narrowly focused. I was humbled about how little experience I have by a local Tanzanian engineer and how I was not qualified or credible to work on projects here yet. I walked away from that seemingly harsh talk more motivated instead of depressed. He was right. I have never built anything and I have never worked with a technical firm yet; all I have done is taken classes. I realized that the GSBF was not the time for me to test my technical abilities; it was the time for me to test my personal abilities and ambitions.
I learned the importance of fostering relationships on a personal level before a business level; gaining that sense of trust is of upmost importance before any work can get done, especially as I was an outsider this summer. I also learned that I am an observer; oftentimes in meetings, I would not realize that I had not said a word the entire time because I was so curious as to what everyone else was saying and just taking the whole experience in. I got called out multiple times for being quiet and not always sharing my ideas without me even knowing how quiet I was being. I also learned that I work well under pressure. I was aware of this fact before because of school, but I realized that I could come up ideas on the spot if I have to. It was actually how I ended up with my final deliverable (the data Excel spreadsheets). All of PeerLink and BanaPads were just looking at Ty, Caroline, and I to come up with a way for us to process the handwritten spreadsheets that day at that moment. We scrambled for a little bit, but then formatted the final deliverable within a half hour. All of the formulas that I had learned about Excel came back to me and kept giving me ideas. Getting this experience of testing my physical limits of living in a rural area in Uganda and learning more about myself and my tendencies when I am tested and when I am with unfamiliar people was more impactful than I think just working on my project that I had planned to do since April.
Teaching BanaPads staff how to use Excel.
From this whole GSBF experience, I have reaffirmed my passion that was initially ignited four years ago, but I now have the passion with a new perspective. I don’t want to create products that can be just dropped off in developing countries to sit and fail; I want to be able to learn about the culture and the people who have a specific need and be able to incorporate a product that fits their daily lives. I want products that are sustainable; the people in the communities see a need for them and can fix and maybe even produce them by themselves. I realize now that this entails education first, which was a method that BanaPads used to introduce its product. People will not use a product if they do not understand the relevance. It is the same here in the United States, but people in developing countries to do have access to Google any time of the day to learn about the relevance on their own. Working with developing countries takes more than just technical knowledge; an outside technical person needs to be familiar with the business, cultural, social, and educational norms of the community.
This realization of needing to have well-rounded knowledge has influenced my “big kid” decisions of what I want to do next. I want to begin in a work environment that forces me to learn more than just the technical sides of projects; I want to be able to see the business sides and the customer needs sides of projects. I was fortunate enough through GSBF to be able to learn more about business and see it played out with BanaPads, and I fell in love with the intersection of business and technology and the importance of understanding both in order to get people to “buy in” to your reasoning behind a technical product. There is a necessary skill to be able to “speak the language” of the people you are working with. As a technical person, I may have a kind of language barrier of someone who has grown up working in the business world with no technical knowledge. In order to gain more insight into the business language, I have decided to partner with Ilumexico, a GSBI alumni, for my senior design project. I am again able to continue my experience of working with the developing world, but this time on a technical project so I can test my ability to be able to convey my message to people with a business background. My senior design project will just be one more experience along my path to help me get out into the working world.
I am hoping that every experience I have from here on out gets me one step closer to my final goal that I have had since the day I was observing SMU’s engineering project my senior year of high school: designing frugal and sustainable products for communities in the developing world.
Uganda truly is the Pearl of Africa.