Iowa State University
Mark Tekippe, ISU Senior, Electrical Engineering
Participant in the 2006 Service Learning Course
Kamuli district, Uganda
"People are more similar than I had ever imagined. Our team was comprised of six American students and three students from Makerere University. We spent our lives growing up in contrasting civilizations and, as a result, each of us had a very different view of the world. But no matter how different, it amazed me how we were able to work together and learn from each other. Sometimes, things that seemed to make sense to me did not actually make sense for the people in the Kamuli district. Living and working with the Makerere University students illustrated to me how valuable it is to work in diverse teams."
"Sustainability requires quite a different approach and vision--working towards something which can someday sustain itself and leave people better than they were before."
"As an electrical engineering student, I'm essentially training to solve problems. In my discipline, most of them focus on concern control systems, transfer functions, and signal processing, but I think the skills I am taught can really be applied to any problem."
"My time in Uganda taught me what it takes to perform with limited time, resources, and understanding in an unfamiliar place, with new people, and new problems. Working with a limited set of resources under a foreign set of constraints completely redefines problem solving and I cannot think of many experiences that have required me to adapt to this level before. Since our time in the field was so limited, it was even more critical for us to adapt quickly to our new surroundings."
"I hope that my time in Uganda will not simply be a memory. My experiences in Uganda have made the world a much smaller place to me, but my capacity to improve it, much greater."
