My name is Aubrey Mphatso Chinkunda, i’m 21 years old and i am a Malawian Student from the Malawi University of science and Technology currently studying Biomedical Engineering. I’m in my fourth year.

wow!

A lot has happened this week. I will try my very best to cover everything. I arrived on 08 June from Malawi after 22 hours of travelling, i was so exhausted. I ,together with my fellow Malawian interns met up with Dr Leutaud who bought us Chipotle (this was my first time have it) and gave us a quick tour of the Martel college. We then met up with our TA’s, Grant and Adulfor who showed us the South Servery and the different churches all over campus.

Boot Camp officially started on Monday, in the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. We had to introduce ourselves mentioning which college we are coming from, our major and the year we are in. Then ice breakers kicked in. We through a ball that had so many questions around. Once you catch it, you had to answer the question next to your thumb. My question was “what do you look like when you are being yourself?”. And the answer to that was ………. We then went on to get our Rice IDs  at the Rice Police Department ,which took longer than expected. We ended up missing the Houston Zoo visit. After sorting out the complications we the IDs, we went straight to the south servery and had an early lunch (i don’t really think there is such thing as an early lunch, lunch is lunch, despite the time).

After that, we went over the general Schedule of the  summer internship program which showed that the first was going to be as hectic as it gets. Then we went to the Office of International Students and Scholars to check in. This also took longer than planned. one of the reasons might have been because there was some free food involved. We then went back to the OEDK where we were introduced to ENGI 120. We ended up finishing later than the required time because of all the delays at the OISS and RUPD.

On Tuesday, we skipped the ice breakers because we were running behind schedule. We went straight to the official tour of the OEDK. This was very interesting because almost everything was found in the OEDK. We even went into a room with a TV and an Xbox. After that, we watched a video about Safety and took a mandatory Safety quiz. After that the fun began. We were split into teams to  deconstruct different devices. On our team, we dismantled a Printer/Photocopier. We found a bunch of dc motors, gears and lots of ink.( i never knew i printer had motors inside). It was a nice experience. In the afternoon we made presentations  in groups about our different cultures here in the USA and in Malawi.

After that we got the presentation on the Zoo Project. We are supposed to design an enrichment tool, something like a puzzle feeder for a 6 year old Red River hog from the Houston Zoo to make it physically and mentally active.

In the evening we had a bunch of videos to watch and quizzes to do. There were so many videos we had to watch each at twice the normal speed with subtitles on.

On Wednesday, we divided into our Zoo Project teams. I’m part of team Bear. We jotted down some questions to ask our client and then went to the zoo for an interview with the client. We also went to the hog’s pen and looked at the existing puzzle feeders.

 

We then came back and had a challenge among the teams to come up with a stand using 6 plane paper rolls, tape and a string. As you would have guessed, Team Bear took first place.

I’m really proud to be part of SEED 2019. I want to use this opportunity to learn so much about designing and engineering as i can. In Malawi we don’t really get so much practical with our school programs so i feel like this is something that will equip me with a unique set of skills.

Here are some of the pictures we took this week.

 

Team Bear with a book stand made from 6 plane paper rolls, tape and a string.

Brainstorming!!!!

Next week i will tell you about how crazy our brainstorming station got.