Four weeks of intensive coursework and research in climate and urban development policy and engineering theory.
Armed with a significantly more refined sense of my academic and professional goals, I returned to my summer pre-college adventures, this time at a school closer to home: Columbia University. The doors to the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Sciences swung open with the tap of my ID card as I began my four-week experience in “A Better Planet By Design.”
This was not an on-campus residential experience like Summer@Brown–instead of a scenic fifteen-minute walk from Sears Hall to the Barus and Holley engineering building, I was careening through the bowels of the New York City subway system for an hour both ways–but the layout of the campus felt surprisingly true to the urban-suburban mix I had witnessed at Brown. (I later learned that this was achieved through an elevated campus layout, raised above the rest of the Upper West Side and connected to the pedestrian level by stairs and allowing for a greater sense of separation from the concrete jungle of Morningside Heights. Fascinating!)
The vast majority of students attending SHAPE (Summer High School Academic Program for Engineers) had registered for either robotics or computer science, the program’s most popular courses, so my class was relatively small and sequestered from the rest of the program, on the sixth floor of the SEAS building in a concrete-walled lecture room.
Our instructor was Professor Bourtsalas, a prominent figure in the review of sustainable urban systems who has published extensive research on applications of circular economics and industrial symbiosis around the world, including the implementation and operation of waste-to-energy plants and development of more efficient recycling methods and technologies. While it was not as hands-on as the other programs, it aligned nearly perfectly with my developing interests and helped me bring my thoughts and criticisms of the civilized world out of the realm of ideation and into that of theory and practice.