Rowan engineering students worked in collaboration with alum in Panama and El Salvador

She worked full-time for nine years with engineering consulting firms and obtained her Professional Engineer license in New Jersey, but decided to leave that behind and pursue something that she was passionate about.

Caitlin Terry, a 33-year-old civil engineering graduate of Rowan University from Vineland, New Jersey, decided to take her talents around the world.

Crossing the globe

From Guatemala to Tajikistan, Sudan to Nepal, Panama to El Salvador, Terry has been all over the globe with Hydromissions International, building water/sanitation systems to aid underdeveloped areas.

Students in the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering at Rowan University wanted to take what they learned in the classroom and apply it in real-life settings.

In the last four years, Rowan engineering students have collaborated with Terry in three countries (Haiti, Panama and El Salvador) under the umbrella of Rowan’s Engineering Innovators without Borders (EIWB) as part of engineering clinic projects at the school.

Inspiring creativity

“I wanted to inspire their creativity in order to help others and expose them to ways to use their education to serve communities abroad,” said Terry. “I did not want to encourage them to all follow my exact path, but I wanted them to see how they could take a seemingly overwhelming problem and break it down slowly and make small differences—using small steps to solve big problems.”

In an engineering clinic led by Dr. Beena Sukumaran, professor and chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering, students worked on an addition to Terry’s current manual drilling equipment. The students received a grant from the United States Environmental Protection Agency to design the drill and travel to Isla Bastimentos, Panama, during spring break 2014 to drill a well for a small community of 60 people.

The students who went to Panama were:

Patrick Downey, a senior civil and environmental engineering major from Ewing, New Jersey.
Jessica Guglielmo, a senior civil and environmental engineering major from Hewitt, New Jersey.
Eric Seckinger, a senior civil and environmental engineering major from Somers Point, New Jersey.
Brittany Smith, a civil and environmental engineering 2014 graduate from Gibbsboro, New Jersey.

Working morning to night

The students had labor-intensive days with the manual equipment. They would work morning to night, trying to find a good source of drinking water for the community. In addition to the drilling, students also built two PVC pumps to hand pump water from the well. The students’ efforts in collaboration with Terry’s proved successful. The well is still used daily in Isla Bastimentos.

“Students benefit by working on a real-life project with a community in the developing world addressing their concerns. It has really opened their eyes to the needs of the developing world and how their engineering skills can be used to benefit humankind by developing devices that are constrained by economics and availability of materials,” Sukumaran said.

Multiple projects

In fall 2014, Guglielmo and Downey traveled back to Panama to build a latrine for the community as well as a new school. Guglielmo, Downey and Terry worked together to raise funds for the materials through a crowd-funding campaign.

Guglielmo decided to continue her efforts by working with Terry earlier this year, but this time in La Cumbre, El Salvador. They worked together for five weeks on a spring catchment project, where they built a concrete tank to collect water coming from a mountain spring and then piped it to a large water storage tank they built from corrugated metal and concrete.

Using a turbine students developed in engineering clinics, they tested to see if they could convert water energy to power and store it in a car battery. Unfortunately, it was unsuccessful this time, but Terry will return with a modified turbine to try again in the summer.

Important to contribute

“I would love to work on more charitable projects like Caitlin does with Hydromissions throughout my life. While life can get hectic sometimes, I think it is important to find time occasionally to put it all into perspective and remember that we should do our best to help each other because we're are all in this together,” said Downey.

As for Terry, she was recently in Panama, continuing drilling for water and building latrines. Soon she will be returning to El Salvador, then off to Guatemala to check on existing projects and help with little repairs.

“My passion is to travel to remote impoverished villages worldwide, showing God's love as I help people gain access to safe drinking water,” said Terry.

Rowan students plan to continue working with her on future projects.

(You can follow Terry at www.howmanycows.com.)