Hey there! I'm Isabel, a '20 from the sunny town of Tucson, Arizona. I spend most of my time at the Thayer School of Engineering, but you can also spot me hanging out with plants and my twin brother in the greenhouse, snapping photos of picturesque Hanover, or drinking iced coffee even during the winter (Arizona habits die hard). I'm an undergraduate advisor for the North Park housing community as well as a member of the marching band, Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineers, and Club Swim.
This special topics class taught Adobe Illustrator and the CAD software Rhino 3D. We laser cut, 3D-printed, and used the CNC router to cut huge sheets of plywood to make pavilion structures. My group made an 11 foot tall pineapple structure that now sits in House Center A .
This is the one class that Professor Merton teaches each year and it is well worth it just for her. The texts are transformative and lend themselves to self reflection and better learning in all aspects of life. The expertly planned assignments helped me become a much better writer.
ENGS 20 with Professor Taylor is taught in a "flipped classroom" style where one watches mini-lectures before class and works on coding projects during class. Students are assumed to have no coding experience coming into this class and are taught the basics of C and Matlab languages.
SummerTucson, AZ
I went home for the summer, enjoyed the sun, swam nearly everyday, and worked for Cocina Verify, a startup company that verifies food safety in restaurants in Latin America.
The Peru LSA+ for Spanish is one of the defining moments of my Dartmouth career. We pet llamas, hiked in extraordinarily beautiful places, visited Machu Picchu, and read amazing Peruvian literature, my favorite of which is Rosa Cuchillo by Oscar Colchado Lucio.
My favorite class ever! Taught by the renowned Argentine comic artist Liniers, we looked at Latin American comics through time and were exposed to history and many variations of the Spanish language.
ENGS 44 teaches the basics of sustainable building design. Throughout the course we designed tiny homes for varying applications and went on several field trips around the Upper Valley, including a visit to a straw-bale insulated home in Vermont.
My class designed a range of installations for the Dartmouth Organic Farm, including small buildings, amphitheaters, and comprehensive pathway systems. We went on a site visit to the Organic Farm and had weekly lessons for the software Rhino 3D.
ENGS 37 is a chill engineering class that covers diverse technologies for water and air treatment, risk assessment, design for the environment, life-cycle assessment of a product, and other related topics. We also had one week of field trips during class!
WinterTucson, AZ
I spent my winter off-term enjoying the Arizona weather at home and working remotely for a FinTech startup based in New York. It was nice to have some time to reflect on my Dartmouth experience thus far and refocus for the future.
I took ENGS 71 with Vicki May, one of my favorite Thayer professors. The course covers modeling and approximation of structural systems, for example calculating the type, dimension, and layout of beams to properly support a roof with certain applied loads.
SummerBeverly, MA
This summer I worked for Build Health International, a non-profit that designs, builds, and equips healthcare infrastructure in low-resource settings. I worked on initial design for a hospital in Rwanda and researched germicidal UV lamps at hospitals in Haiti.
In ARTH 38.01 we learned about Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic architecture as well as Asian funerary architecture. Professor Hockley taught us the basics of religious thought and introduced us to many fabulous structures.
Modern Architecture, taught by Professor Heck, starts in the mid-18th century with Neoclassicism and ends with the expansion of the 'International Style' post WWII.
SpringTucson, AZ
I am taking Glaciology, Reproductive Ethics, and Machos & Malinches (Gender and Sexual Identities in Latin/x American Literature and Culture) remotely this spring term.
This summer I worked as an Autodesk Student Expert Intern at Build Health International (BHI), a non-profit that designs, builds, and equips healthcare infrastructure in low-resource settings to enable the provision of dignified care. BHI's projects include hospitals in Haiti, Sierra Leone, and Malawi, a BSL-3 lab in Peru, a solar grid for a hospital in Niger, and more.
St. Boniface Hospital.
Taking data at St. Boniface Hospital.
I applied to BHI through ThayerLink, a job posting platform for Thayer School of Engineering students. Thayer Career Services has since switched ThayerLink for a platform called Handshake, but the functionality is the same: helping Thayer students find internships and jobs. I was very excited about the BHI posting because I wanted to gain experience with real-world architecture projects and use of sustainable building practices. Thankfully this past spring I had no classes on Tuesday so I was able to take a day trip down to Beverly, MA to interview. They were impressed by the work I had done in ENGS 44 (Sustainable Design) and thankfully offered me the chance to intern!
U-GENE, the UVC testing rig we created.
At the beginning of the internship, I had the exciting opportunity to work on the initial schematic design for a 170-bed state of the art hospital in Kigali, Rwanda—an initiative of Her Excellency the First Lady, Jeannette Kagame. I researched design precedents for the region and participated in an office-wide design charrette to produce an initial campus plan layout. Everyone in the office came together for a quick turn-around before the first meeting with the Minister of Health, after which I transitioned to my second project.
My main project this summer was developing and executing a research plan on upper room germicidal UV lamps (GUV). BHI uses these lamps in many of their hospitals to disinfect the air and kill tuberculosis bacteria. However, research on the effectiveness of GUV fixtures in health facilities in low-resource settings is scant. We set out to change that by researching the fixtures installed in our hospitals in Haiti.
GUV fixture with bugs.
I traveled to Haiti with a team of four research staff to complete on-site testing at two of BHI's facilities: St. Boniface Hospital in Fond-des-Blancs and Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais (HUM) in Mirebalais. The data we collected during the trip has allowed us to identify potential safety concerns due to installation environments and to set up a continuing study on the efficacy of maintenance plans. BHI hopes to contribute to the literature by publishing our research and providing information that can assist in the decision to use lamps in low-resource settings.
Comparing the output of two types of GUV fixture. I used Matlab skills from ENGS 20 (Introduction to Scientific Computing) to produce these 4D data visualizations.
I am grateful to BHI for providing me an opportunity to work on projects with real-world impact and I am excited to take what I learned this summer back to Dartmouth to make my senior year the best it can be.
This past fall, armed with my government-issued cell phone and backpack, I headed out to the streets of Albuquerque, NM and counted for the 2020 U.S Census.
As much as I love our six-week Winterim (winter interim) break, I'm glad to be back here, writing for you all once again! Take a look inside this blog post to see how one Dartmouth student spent their winterim.
My experiences this past week perfectly exemplify the strength and dedication of our alumni network and Dartmouth's level of involvement in the energy and environmental sectors.
The idea for Give Essential—a nonprofit that connects essential workers in need of household items with donors who are able to support them—initially grew out of a Dartmouth class, Social Entrepreneurship (ECON 77).
As I look at the calendar, it's hard for me to believe that summer is already over. Although I wholeheartedly welcome the beginning of fall and the cooler weather that comes with it, this summer was truly unlike any other.
This summer, I worked on an operations management research project that looked at how medical billing codes could be improved to avoid fraud or exploitation.
I applied to BHI through ThayerLink, a job posting platform for Thayer School of Engineering students. Thayer Career Services has since switched ThayerLink for a platform called Handshake, but the functionality is the same: helping Thayer students find internships and jobs. I was very excited about the BHI posting because I wanted to gain experience with real-world architecture projects and use of sustainable building practices. Thankfully this past spring I had no classes on Tuesday so I was able to take a day trip down to Beverly, MA to interview. They were impressed by the work I had done in ENGS 44 (Sustainable Design) and thankfully offered me the chance to intern!
