Carnegie Mellon held Meeting of the Minds today, the school’s undergraduate research symposium. We submitted our project into the competition along with hundreds of other students. Projects can fit into a variety of categories determined by the subject matter and its academic relevance. Students presented robotics, biology, visual art, and economics focused projects. Our project, iSTEP 2012 was the cross-college projects because Corinne and Julie, our two undergraduate teammates, belong to different colleges; Civil and Environmental Engineering and Humanities and Arts, respectively.
The entire team was responsible for developing the poster- a visual representation and explanation of the project that we have been preparing to implement in Ghana. But due to the rules of the symposium, only Corinne and Julie as undergraduates were allowed to be official presenters when the judges came around. They did a great job sharing what research has been done about waste and water issues in Ghana and at Ashesi. They expressed the purpose and path of our project even as it continues to progress toward our departure to Africa.
Scott, Sandeep and I are proud of their efforts. This experience gave us a sense of our strengths and how far we have come as a team. Kudos to Corinne for setting up the poster and manning the station even though she was under the weather. For a few moments after the rest of the team left, Julie and I had a great conversation about the other projects she was presenting in the symposium and about her role on our team. She was instrumental in designing the layout of the poster.
iSTEP is shaping up and about to launch into a full sprint toward Ghana. We will be ready.
-Ronnell @AfroVirtud
