CON U ENGINEERS WIN BIG
The Concordia chapter of Engineers Without Borders might need to construct some kind of lever to lift all the hardware they won at EWB’s recent national conference.
The chapter won awards for most improved chapter and best project at the Toronto-based convention.
“[The most improved award] was based on our improvement from last year to this year. Last year we had a total of 37 activities recorded, whereas this year, we have so far 103, so it was a drastic improvement,” said EGB Concordia President Jad Saleh. “We also recruited a lot of new members. We had 16 students from our chapter [at the conference], and most of them were attending for the first time or were first year students, which is a good thing for us because that means we are going to have a good future.”
The award for best project was given to one of the two submissions by the Concordia chapter into a field of 65. The project, which was done in conjunction with the McGill chapter, saw the volunteers obliterating the divide that exists between high school students in two different hemispheres. It recruited students at Tamale High School for Girls in Ghana and Heritage Regional High School in Montreal.
“It’s about linking high school students in Montreal with high school students in Ghana,” said Saleh. “We asked both groups to come up with a problem they were facing in their high schools. The Ghanians said their problem was that their English wasn’t that good, which they need to pass high school and go to university. The people here said that their problem is that students are becoming more obese, because their physical education for one of their semesters got cancelled.”
After each school described its problem, the other school was asked to come up with a solution. When given what the other school had come up with, the students were again asked to come up with a final answer to their problem, in the process learning about the thought process of other cultures.
Concordia’s Engineering Faculty was also declared Fair Trade Certified due to a project that has seen all the coffee and tea served in the faculty’ meeting the strict fair trade standards.
“If there’s a department meeting or a council meeting going on in the building, any coffee served will be fair trade,” said Saleh. “All the shops that the university owns or has the power to change in the EV building will be selling fair trade coffee and tea.”
This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 20, published January 25, 2011.
