Coffee and Civil Engineering
The program tour of the day brought students to Roast House Coffee, where founder Deborah Di Bernardo shared her business journey and process of roasting coffee beans using various equipment in the warehouse.
At lunch, speaker Emma Clawson shared her path to becoming an electrical engineer. She is a power engineer at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, a global provider of digital systems for the power industry.
The SSIP participants spent time in some of the civil engineering labs, learning a little about traffic engineering and water resources engineering. Students experimented with erosion and the flow of water through terrain with the topography table (above), which uses sensors and lights projected on a table of sand, and the the sand table (left).
Dr. Sue Niezgoda (left, center) showed the students how to model the flow of a river or a stream with equipment in the Water Lab. Then, with Dr. Rhonda Young, they used Legos to consider what goes into a block of street and sidewalks to be safe and accessible for everyone, including pedestrians and cyclists.
Kim Zentz talks with the students during dinner. Her training as a civil engineer took her career into entrepreneurship and project leadership in several fields, including utilities, transportation, and tech start-up.
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