At the beginning of this week it actually hit me: there are only two weeks left. It is crazy to me how quickly these weeks have flown by. We realized that after all of the work that we had done, it was now time to put everything together into the suggestions that we are going to present to the stakeholders and the design studio managers.
The week started off with a workshop by Hastings Golosi. This was truly an incredible workshop. Hastings is an entrepreneur in Malawi that has started a computer repair company, invested in pig farming, started a film company, and started a program to inspire young people to be entrepreneurs and reach for their dreams. Inspire us he did. He spoke about the dreams that we have for our futures and about not waiting for them to happen. He urged us not to use the excuse of “I’ll do that when I’m done with school,” and emphasized how important mindset and visualization of goals was to final outcome. It was really amazing to learn about what he accomplished with so little resources.
The rest of the week we had team working time, a workshop from Faith Mzandu, and a career and technology presentation from some of the Rice 360 team of faculty mentors and TAs (Professors Alick and Richard; TAs Hope and Francis; and student Brenald) The workshop from Ms. Mzandu was quite eye opening. She is the co-founder of WomEng Malawi and is doing fantastic work. Listening to her speak made me very proud of my teammates who are all women. I hadn’t considered the difficulties of being a woman engineer, especially in Malawi, until Ms. Mzandu talked to us. I am grateful for the workshop and for the incredible experience of working together with my very talented teammates. The main takeaway I took from the career paths workshop was how to frame your work in your mind. You can do many similar types of jobs but in an array of fields. This is especially true in engineering. You can be an engineer and work in a hospital, a lab, an oil rig, and a dam just to name a few. This workshop helped me to get out of the mindset of college –> medical school –> residency –> doctor and really made me consider the ways I could apply the things I am interested in into this path.
This week my team and I worked quite a bit. In solidifying our final proposals, we changed what we thought we were going to do from the beginning. We focused on changing the shape of the current system as our main suggestion but had hit a dead-end in which shape to suggest. Then we had an epiphany that we think will be very successful and hit most of our target goals. We worked on presentations, scripts, videos, and more. We are proud of the suggestions that we will be making to the design studio as the show the effort, research, and attention to detail that we have put into this project. We can’t wait to present this coming.
-Andrew Abikhaled