Oh yeah, I graduate on May 17th and 18th.

I guess we have two.

I'm not sure why.  I'm going with pretentiousness.

So I'm wrapping up my last day of college here.  Just finished a paper last minute, and I've got another to get to before it's all said and done, but that last tiny step will be the last I take as a college man.  College boy?  College youth-whose-maturity-wavers-between-2-and-70-years-old?

A million and a half (1,000,000.5) thoughts are whriling about in my head, but all of them unformed, just below the liquid surface of conscious reality, like seeing fish swim in dark water; they're certainly there, but you can never quite manage to look right at them. 

So will it be a big deal?  Will I go home tonight and have a life-bending epiphany? 
I'm standing at the edge of a cliff, to be sure.  I could be asking myself questions like "what's the best way down?"

"Do I have the right equipment for all this?"

"Maybe I don't have to jump/climb at all, maybe I can fly."

I'm sure other extensions to the analogy will strike later, but those questions aren't crowding my mind, are keeping the thought-fish from jumping.   What I find myself wondering about the cliff is: "is it really a cliff?" 

Will tomorrow be different or will it just be tomorrow?


I'm not sure, but I guess I'll find out :)

So... ah... about this whole blogging thing.  It's time to write again.

In t minus 5 hours our four-person Engineers Without Borders team leaves for Antigua, Guatemala to begin a five day extravaganza of land surveying, people interviewing and site assessing.  Thus begins our official relationship with La Asociacion Nuestros Ahijados (ANA), an international NGO which "seeks to break the bonds of poverty through education."  

The work for this trip includes (at the moment),

1. Cut/fill requirements for a soon-to-be vocational center:  Essentially they want to know about how much dirt they'll have to remove.
2. Optimization of small house builds:  ANA offers famillies with children in its programs small houses free of charge, provided they own their own land.  The Wash U chapter of EWB launched a design competition in February to redesign/optimize these builds with a focus on sustainaiblity.   Winning design will be adopted by ANA and built in and around Antigua.
3. Site assessment and erosion control plan:  Guatemala could teach New Orleans a thing or two about flooding and monsoon rains, and our third trip goal will be to assess an ANA property in a flood prone area on which a dental/medical/educational center will eventually be built.  We'll be looking for flood information such as intensity, duration, water height/speed, muddiness, etc. 

The last will afford the most technical challenges, but to address the house builds, we'll be interviewing the families living in the current design, and... well... we're engineers.  Making the connection between the physical world and the human reality promises to be a huge opportunity for both my professional and personal growth.

Needless to say, I'm stoked about it all.

Last little note, ANA is some sort of sub-NGO to the larger God's Child Project.  La Asociacion Nuestros Ahijados means The Association of Our Godchildren. 

All Engineering, no borders.