My Entrepreneurship competency was filled by co-founding a company my freshman year. Through a friend, I met a local business owner with an idea for a professional services startup and a need for both software development and marketing teams. The idea was Gavelgo — a site enabling small businesses to interact directly with potential customers through exclusive deals and auctions. For two and a half years, I worked to develop the technology for the company, as well as hire other developers, speak with legal consultants and potential investors, run closed beta tests with potential customers, write business plans and overview documents, and generate market reports. I left the company while it was still in development due to school and work constraints, but in my time with them, I gained a more clear understanding of how companies start and become successful, but more importantly, how and why they can fail.

The Service Learning pillar is an opportunity to address problems that impact people and their communities, preparing students to better handle the social dimensions inherent to Grand Challenges.

As a sophomore, I volunteered at the Excel Academy in Arvada, Colorado teaching an after-school robotics and programming class to 7th and 8th graders. We met once a week for a semester, each time with a lesson on fundamental programming concepts and an open-ended circuit build.

Two years later, I interned as a software engineer for Viasat, a broadband communications company based in Carlsbad, California. At an internal hackathon, our team of software engineering, data analytics, marketing, and business interns developed a machine learning model to better predict and prevent customer churn. The system provides possible discounts and plan changes for customer care agents to suggest to dissatisfied customers over the phone. We did not win the main competition, but did win our category of “a new perspective on an old problem”.

The Global pillar aims at bolstering the understanding of different cultures to ensure widespread acceptance of proposed engineering solutions. At Mines, I achieved this through both in-class and hands-on experiences.

My junior year, I enrolled in Asia: Politics and Society, a course at Mines taught by Professor James Jesudason. It explores the social, political, economic, and cultural environments of Eastern and Southeastern asian countries. As a final project, I wrote a research paper analyzing how Myanmar’s Rohingya refugee crisis is influenced and fueled in part by social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Myanmar has been plagued for decades with violent conflict between their military and various ethnic and religious groups. Social media in no way induced the struggle, but in recent years, has become a powerful tool for the military to spread misinformation, cultivating a collective hatred for these minorities. Researching and compiling this paper added nuance to my technological worldview, showing me the need for balanced and culturally aware approaches to the Grand Challenges.

In the fall of 2019, I attended the Global Grand Challenges Student Collaboration Lab in London. There, I competed in a one day design competition on a team of students from China, the U.K., and the U.S. We designed a data management system for the healthcare industry based on Blockchain technology and the Ethereum network. Our objective was to design a product that could unify the healthcare industry’s big data management efforts, while being flexible enough to fit each country’s unique health needs and culture. Advancing health informatics grows ever more vital as the world population approaches ten billion, but each country’s healthcare system and culture of healthcare is different. This project was excellent practice in designing not around those differences, but for them.

The Project pillar is a chance for students to unify and apply the skills they have learned from the Scholar Program to a Grand Challenges-related problem.

In the fall of 2019, I worked with a group of students from Mines to build a virtual reality application for Lockheed Martin. This semester-long project was for Field Session, Mines’ version of senior design. It is a fantastic way of having students culminate their undergraduate knowledge by working for real clients on real projects. Many types of companies participate, each offering a slightly different perspective on industry, and students choose what most interests them. Over the course of four months, teams meet weekly with their clients to report progress, receive guidance, and plan for upcoming tasks. Consistent meetings and constant communication allows students to not only build a useful product, but also gain a glimpse of what important problems their education can be used to solve and what real industry work looks like.

The application my team designed and built was for visualizing data from space object catalogs and alerting users to potential space events, like pending collisions. It consists of a global view, showing space objects and observation sites from an in-orbit perspective, a ground view that has the user look up from those observation sites, and various data-driven views for aggregating information regarding those objects, as well as monitoring events. In the future, the program will be expanded to allow the user to directly adjust orbits and send instructions to satellites.

Space object visualization and manipulation applications address the Grand Challenge of engineering the tools for scientific discovery. Lockheed Martin was previously using Tableau for visualization — a powerful tool, but not well suited for satellite data. By giving the company and its clients more engaging, intuitive insight into their data, they can better understand and act on it, thus more efficiently and effectively leveraging their satellites for gathering data about and understanding the world.

The Entrepreneurship pillar is for learning ingenuity, teamwork, and communication in a venture setting. My time at Gavelgo absolutely bolstered these qualities for me, but more importantly, I gained valuable experience in marketing and customer discovery that I later applied to my Interdisciplinary pillar.

As a software developer, I was almost entirely focused on the product’s technical aspects — how the databases were designed, what information to gather from users, what new features to implement, server infrastructure, and so on. I had to be in order to do my job well, but now, with space and time away from the project, I see that singular focus may not often work in a startup setting. It certainly may in larger, established companies, where employees can compartmentalize responsibilities, but not one with five employees. Since I had to contribute to marketing as well, my technically-minded perspective damaged it. I tried to show people the product as I saw it, describing it in terms of the mechanics of customer-to-business interactions and what gap we were filling in the market. What I did not realize at the time was that advertising a good or service does not often center around why that product is better than others or give a laundry list of its best qualities. Instead, advertising tends to sell buyers on an idea or a feeling, conflating a particular lifestyle or virtue with that product. A car is not just fuel efficient and safe, the driver is shown to be adventurous, well-respected, or mysterious. A phone does not just have a long battery life, the user appears youthful, sociable, and happy. Most companies are not addressing Grand Challenges, but the same lesson can be applied to those that are. Buyers are not often swayed by straight facts and “reason” about a product, so selling something like a cheaper solar panel may not succeed this way. It is reasonable to see that installing solar panels is good for the environment, but advertising a lifestyle of convenience and modernity may result in wider adoption. Entering the Scholars Program, I assumed the Grand Challenges were immune to this marketing phenomenon, but at the end of the day, their solutions are products like any other, needing an emotional appeal to succeed.

Ineffective advertising was not the last of Gavelgo’s woes. Compounding the issue was insufficient customer discovery. I was again too concerned with developing the functional aspects of the technology, as well as delivering incremental releases to the rest of the team. I did not focus on finding what needed to be created, instead letting the initial idea of what we wanted to make drive development. A number of businesses had expressed interest in the time I was with the company, but there seemed to be a larger disconnect between what the community could benefit the most from and what we were offering them. Ultimately, we worked backwards, falling in love with a particular solution, not the core problem. All ventures, especially those related to the Grand Challenges, can benefit from avoiding this approach.

Going to school for engineering, especially at an all-engineering university, can make it hard to feel connected to the rest of the world. Course content is often divorced from application and lacking a focus on people. I have gained valuable skills from school, but have felt they have been put to good use only when applied socially, rather than technically. Teaching as a volunteer at Excel was the first chance I had to do this. University serves to prepare you for a job, but with these kids, I finally was not focusing on how I could make money or grow my own skills. I was reminded what the goal of engineering is in the first place — not to exist for its own sake or for the sake of its followers, but to improve people’s lives. Granted, I was teaching the students computer science as a potential career path in the same way Mines taught it to me, but promoting a career never felt like my goal. Instead, I just wanted the kids to better understand the technology-steeped world around them and have fun doing it. Engineering usually improves quality of life by increasing the health and convenience of consumers, but less often joy. This class was a refreshing chance to shift that imbalance for myself.

Teaching these kids did not change my life. It was not the first or greatest experience I have had volunteering or giving back to the community. But it was one of the first things I did at Mines that felt connected to the real world. We designed products and programs for the homeless in the Bridge course freshman year, but those projects never felt very impactful. They felt like we were looking through glass, deciding for ourselves what we saw and what needed to be done. Teaching at Excel was different. I do not think I changed any lives, but the students had never had access to programming or robotics classes before, and they seemed to genuinely enjoy the opportunity.

My experience at the Viasat hackathon had a similar theme of joy — the team and I wanted to make customers more satisfied with the technology already available to them, not push new technology onto them. We did show that the company did not always have to charge customers more to profit the most from them, but this was never the goal. Internet service providers have notoriously poor ratings, at least in the United States, so we simply wanted to give customers a better experience. This made pitching our idea straightforward — more money and increased customer satisfaction is a no-brainer. Many judges were quickly on board, but it was not easy convincing the rest of them. The company would still lose money in the short term and cost benefit analyses can only be so indicative of reality. There is always a risk they are incomplete or unable to account for unforeseen factors, resulting in a net loss. I think what finally won them over was considering the fact that higher customer satisfaction would result in improved company image, which could in turn drive customer recruitment. Convincing the remaining judges was a learning point for me — entering the Scholars Program, I figured that nearly everyone cares about these big problems and that financial bottom lines are less of a priority to executives and investors. But not everyone shares those values and practical things like money often get in the way, so you have to tailor your pitch to each crowd differently.

The hackathon was a reminder that prioritizing people over profits can be challenging. Money deeply influences a product’s success, regardless of whether it is satellite WiFi or something integral in solving the Grand Challenges. Engineering, then, is entrenched within the economic structures around it, even if those structures make it difficult to help people. So, maybe engineering needs a way to partially or completely divorce innovations from economics, perhaps in the form of drastically increased government funding. Engineers and scientists could then focus more on getting people what they need, even if customers could not afford it otherwise. A good example is the Federal Communication Commission’s Connect America Fund initiative. Internet Service Providers and broadband companies, including Viasat, are given federal subsidies for increasing rural broadband access, a historically unprofitable endeavor. Providers would love to increase access in theory, but without monetary supplement, find the effort less appealing. Increased subsidies could reduce the need to choose between revenue and altruism.

I have an overall positive impression of social media. It improves my life in small, simple ways, with the few downsides being just first-world problems. But since its inception, social media has directly contributed to increased bullying and suicide rates, large-scale misinformation, and in many places like Myanmar, hate crimes and genocide. Prior to my research into the topic, I was largely unaware of the extent of the damages digital connections can cause. My research also revealed that many of the problems social media can bring emerged long before it was widely used in Myanmar. This suggests a lack of foresight from Western companies when expanding into new areas and an inability to learn from experience in countries with well-established digital presence. I found this observation particularly applicable to myself as an engineer — it is easy for me to assume that technological innovations will always “work” everywhere. It is easy to view technology as a universal equalizer and as a constant force for good. It is tempting to automatically throw technology at a problem without considering the possibility that it might actually work against your goals. But, one day in class, Professor Jesudason ended his lecture with a saying that has stayed with me: “Equality in opportunity is not equality in outcome.” In this context, I understand this as saying that social, political, and cultural awareness cannot be an afterthought when solving Grand Challenges. Moreover, the successes and failures of previous and current implementations cannot be forgotten when expanding into new markets and countries.

Researching and writing the paper on social media in Myanmar taught me how technology and innovations can have unforeseen consequences when local cultures and sociopolitical climates are not well understood. My Student Collaboration Lab team applied this understanding to MedBlock — as we developed our solution, we acknowledged that the healthcare systems of the world vary wildly, but not always how we expect them to. China and the United States, for instance, have quite similar methods for the electronic storage, access, and analysis of patient data, which our product could improve. But the distinct social and political forces driving those care systems mean that if we attempted to uniformly implement our product, not only would our proposal be more often rejected, it could end up failing the patients and providers we set out to help.

It is obvious to say that things do not work the same way in other parts of the world as they do where I am from. I hear it so often that it has almost become white noise, causing me to consider its implications less. MedBlock reminded me that cultural differences should not just be taken as an implicit assumption when starting projects, or something you know but never really think about, but as central of a focus as the goal and implementation of the product itself.

At the trade show following our presentation, my team and I talked to a mentor who pointed out our product’s potential for helping immigrants, a demographic we had not yet directly considered. Seeing as many of them are displaced from their homes, they often do not have the same medical resources or concerns as the majority of medical patients in the United States. Prior to speaking with the mentor, we had envisioned MedBlock as just working behind the scenes in hospitals, allowing them to better manage and analyze patient information. We came to realize that it can be used on a much more personal basis — directly by patients. Many people, not just immigrants, do not have all their medical information readily accessible. Many more do not have insurance maintaining their records for them or a standard personal identification method. But Blockchain technology could give them a way to carry this information and patient identification with them at all times. This conversation goes to show that not only do differences in cultures and demographics mean your product should change region to region, but they may reveal entirely new use cases, as well.

Before I had any real experience with engineering and technology on a global scale, I remember thinking that they and the atmosphere surrounding them are a universal language where culture and politics have less influence. Consequently, I was led to believe solutions that work in one country will, with few exceptions, work everywhere else. Asia: Politics and Society and MedBlock revealed how far from the truth I was. Politics needs engineering to shape public policy and help lawmakers make informed decisions, but engineering needs an awareness and understanding of politics as well, since solutions do not necessarily work across borders.

Lockheed’s Field Session proposal was particularly exciting to me as an aspiring data scientist, since most other project offerings consisted of building something from scratch with new data, or making repetitive life tasks easier. This application was different in that Lockheed was already visualizing satellites — they had the data and methods for interpreting it, just not the right methods for the task. Tableau was moderately succeeding, but they knew two dimensional graphs were not presenting their data in the best way. What they wanted was to present information in a more immersive, interactive, and customizable way. I was so excited because the project was not about gathering new data or making tools to better gather that data, but about improving the ability to interpret, understand, and apply what was already available. It was a chance to step into an existing problem space, carefully examine how current solutions were lacking, and find what would actually fix the problem. Without that initial investigation, we would not have left the realm of two dimensions. As a result, Lockheed would have been left with just another less than ideal visualization tool, fragmenting their technical ecosystem and missing the core issue entirely. This exploratory process made me realize that engineering challenges do not always need more data to be solved, but instead, engineers often just need ways to better understand what information is already available to them. They can have all the data in the world, but it is useless if they cannot interact with it in the right way. In some cases, it could even be harmful if they misunderstand what it is trying to say. Choosing the best tools is half the work of finding the best solution to a problem. 

Satellites are powerful components of scientific discovery. As their numbers steadily rise, the amount of data they collect grows rapidly. If space traffic controllers can better understand how their satellites are behaving and better dictate how they operate, they can make more informed decisions on how to modify their behavior. Those satellites can then in turn better serve our global data needs. This application obviously does not singlehandedly revolutionize satellite operations, but I feel that this step of improving data understanding plays a large role in removing the busywork of manually interpreting operational data. As a result, scientists and engineers can instead focus on discovering new insights and solving the real problems.

I want to preface this section by reiterating how much I appreciate the Scholars Program augmenting my education at Mines and helping me to grow as an engineer. Mines can be an extremely stressful, rigid, and pedantic place, with the coursework often feeling divorced from the school’s ethos of “Earth, Energy, and Environment”. It was hard to keep in mind all the good engineering can do, but this program was a constant reminder of why I was even at school. That being said, I think the program could be more involved in guiding students through their pillars. The program has students complete activities to teach them teamwork, innovation, and multiculturalism, then has them reflect on what they learn. But if students have not had much prior exposure to a particular pillar, they may be going in blind, not knowing exactly what sort of experience they should be gaining or what skills they should be developing. This hands-off approach is good to a large extent, since it highlights the open-ended nature of and the “no one right answer” mentality of the Grand Challenges, but I think that students could benefit from being pointed in the right direction. They should not be told what to think or exactly what they should learn, but they could be shown what to aim at and what to look for during their activities. Often students, like me, complete a number of pillars before even joining the program, so prior guidance will not always be possible, but it may help otherwise.

At the same time, the Scholars Program at Mines fixes many of the reservations I have with the Grand Challenges themselves. The program stresses the social, political, and cultural aspects of the Challenges, but the original report from the National Academy of Engineering barely does at all. It cursorily mentions “[integrating] methods and solutions with the goals and desires of all society’s members”, but then frames each Challenge almost entirely in terms of technical problem solving. The engineers and scientists that wrote the report understandably expressed the Challenges in terms of their expertise. They are the “Engineering” Grand Challenges, after all. But in framing them that way, what is not shown is the understanding that these problems are not just for engineering, downplaying the professed need for social, political, economic, and cultural competence. The result is that many of the Challenges are expressed as particular technologies, not as the core issues those solutions address. Take the call to “make solar power economical”, for instance. The reader can infer this means that the core problem is combating climate change and eliminating our global reliance on non-renewable energy sources, but it immediately rules out all other options for clean alternatives. The Challenges should state what the problem is, not what the authors believe the solution should be. Then, they would properly acknowledge that these problems are part of larger societal concerns outside of engineering. If engineers should be taking a truly interdisciplinary approach to solving them, we should be only one party in a vast effort addressing not the “Engineering” Grand Challenges, but the “Global” Grand Challenges.

As explained elsewhere, what is absent from the discussion of the Challenges is acknowledgement of what caused them in the first place. I would like to add that they also do not acknowledge the fact that fallout from these problems disproportionately harms smaller, more developing countries. Countries that did far less to get us in this situation in the first place and contribute far less to it worsening. For example, the richest twenty percent of the global population accounts for roughly eighty percent of emissions, but it is the poorest countries that bear the brunt of the damages. Technical solutions themselves cannot account for this disparity and failure to do so will only worsen the problems. The Challenges will never be overcome if equity is not a priority.