Favorite Project by Megan Fox

As a civil and environmental engineering student you don’t get to do many hands-on projects early on in your classes since usually civil engineering projects are large, cost a lot of money, and can put people’s lives at stake. However, there are clubs you can join that allow you to do these hands on projects. My interests lie in environmental engineering, and specifically water, so my freshman year I found a club that does a design challenge for water-related problems. The problem statement was to design a waste water treatment plant for a community in Costa Rica. The first step of the project was to find out any laws or regulations Costa Rica may have. Now there was a problem- Costa Rican laws and regulations are written in Spanish, and nobody in the club knew how to read it. It had been a year since I took Spanish classes, but I could read the laws well enough with the help of google translate. So somehow, as a Freshman who didn’t know anything about waste water treatment and only knew minimal Spanish, I got put in charge of designing the collection system. This is just a fancy way of saying I designed the pipe layouts. I would lay out large maps of the area and take a pencil to draw out where my pipes would be going. I then had to use google maps to check the elevation of certain areas and make sure the pipes ran downhill to the treatment plant. If the pipes were downhill, I then checked how much they would cost.  When I got close to finishing, I was then asked if I would go to Madison, WI to present my design to a panel of judges. This was probably my favorite part of the project because it’s when it dawned on me how real this was. I really enjoyed getting to present all my hard work and receiving feedback on it. It also reminded me of why I decided to become an engineer. There are people out there who still need help. They need engineers to design water treatment plants, and all other kinds of things to help them.