EWB Seattle 2008

Just got back from a four day adventure called the Engineers Without Borders USA, International Conference, Sustainable Engineering and Global Health, some interesting speakers included William H Gates, from the Gates Foundation, NASA Astronaut and Engineer Bonnie Dunbar, and Bernard Amadei the founder of Engineers Without Borders. This conference has been alot of fun, but also exhausting with around 5 hours of sleep each day just to make all the events. Starting on Thursday, with Gates Sr. with a speech about the Gates Foundation and it's goal of Global Health. Later in the evening at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Dr. Bonnie Dunbar, Ph. D gave an inspirational speech that got a standing ovation from the crowd. The many presentations and seminars were not only interesting but they were extremely helpful, it was a great networking opportunity and a great chance to make friends, on Thursday while by myself because the rest of the team had not arrived, I met Lauren and Maria, who were from Clemson University in Greenville, South Carolina, we hit it off well.



So on Friday my friend David and I, gave our newly made friends a bite size tour of Seattle, we parked at the Seattle Center, and took pictures at the Space Needle, then took the monorail to Westlake Center, and then walked down to Pike Place Market to see the sights and shop, afterwards we walked down to the docks and stopped for a bite to eat at Ivar's and tried their famous clam chowder. After getting back to the UW campus we continued our seminar hopping and continued listening and learning, not to mention getting to talk to some of the groups that presented and asking detailed technical questions about their projects one on one. In the projects management seminar I even met an Engineer from Vanderbilt University, [ the team that beat Washington State last year in the NCAA basketball tournament, grrr...lol] who had a OLPC or One Laptop Per Child project, laptop and I got to chat in depth with him about the laptop, it was awesome being about to check out the laptop in person and being about to chat with an Engineer about what he thought about the Laptop. Saturday night there was an event that was labeled ferry cruse and since Lauren and Maria, were both on their last day, needing to skip Monday due to flight schedules, I came along, unfortunately it turned out to be just the Bremerton ferry down and back in the rain and dark and not much to see, it needed to be during the day, to be able to be enjoyed fully.

Finally On Sunday after sleeping over at my friend mike, his friend's place at Seattle Pacific University [SPU] we found out that the direct bus did not run so we hopped onto one that took us a few blocks, the driver told us to catch another bus and he gave us the number, then the next driver told us which bus after that to transfer to, unfortunately it turned out that the driver forgot to mention that at 8 am, the transfer she told us about did not start until 11 past so after consulting the information board, so we decided to just start walking, we caught a trail and walked about a mile or so around Lake Washington and got to the University of Washington campus, we even came just in time for the seminar and didn't miss anything except the morning welcome. The day was great and again even more information to digest and process, in total I took 17 pages of notes from start to finish, it well worth the registration price, I can't wait for next year. EWB-USA at Chicago April 3-5, 2009!!