Observing Community (Prompt 5)

Laxmi Baral

As a member of Engineers Without Border, I have a pretty good idea of how we represent ourself to the community.  Our mission statement is " EWB supports community-driven development programs worldwide by collaborating with local partners to design and implement sustainable engineering projects, while creating transformative experiences and responsible leaders."

Here at MSU, we help out locally and internationally. Members of EWB MSU have many opportunities to help out locally in Lansing.  We give back to the public by volunteering on various different engineering related projects. One example of how we represent ourself to the public is the Woldumar Nature Center Project. At this center, the docks are falling apart, this is unsafe for kids and we will be going there to repair/renew the docks. We have designed and are implementing new docks here at the center. To the public, we are groups of engineers that go out and get the dirty work done, and this is an excellent example of this.

We also help out internationally. I am involved in the Tanzania Project. Back in 2015 a group of EWB members went out to Tanzania, and looked at a school that needed to be redone. They first met with the community there to find out what the needs and the scope of schools was, and discovered some problems. Right now, I am part of the "drawing" team for Tanzania. My group's job is to make CAD (computer aided design) drawings of various features of the school, and provide an analysis to EWB.

One common misrepresenting of our club is at since we are Engineers Without Border we only accept engineering majors, and that is just false. We accept and we welcome any majors as long as they are willing to dedicate them to the project that they are working on. One other misconception might be that since we are engineers, we work on things such as robots, or computers exclusively, and again, this is false.

There are many ways we communicate. Every week, we have a General Meeting. In this meeting we go over the projects we have for the week, as well as going over important dates we have coming up, and so on. After the general meeting each group meets. Since I am a member of the drawing teams for Tanzania, me and my group will meet afterwards. We also communicate through E-mail; every Monday we get an email saying, "hey there is a general meeting on Tuesday, and these are the things we will be going over." Along with email, we also have a shared Google Drive. In this drive, there are all the drawings, and all the dimensions associated with the drawings.