On a Friday afternoon, a team of students gathers in an A.V. Williams lab to plan their next step in helping to make the world a greener place.
This year’s projects include creating new energy-saving ways to wire a home, making LED lights and building a small wind turbine. In future semesters, these members of the Maryland Educational & Sustainable Activities lab hope to keep the projects rolling to educate and craft a more energy-efficient community.
“It’s always a continual process,” sophomore electrical engineering major Brent Bovenzi said. “There’s never an end goal.”
About 30 engineering students are currently involved with MESA, which first opened to students at the beginning of the semester. The team is not an official student organization and the work is unpaid and does not count for academic credit, but that has not diminished the members’ dedication to their projects.
MESA founder Bryan Quinn, who serves as the director of technical operations for the electrical and computer engineering department, said he hopes to recruit more students from a wider variety of majors. Solving environmental issues does not just lie with engineers, he said.
“The issue’s a sphere. If you push it from one side, it just rolls,” Quinn said.
About four years ago, Quinn and two colleagues began brainstorming how they could integrate sustainable learning with college education. While Quinn originally planned to design a new sustainability course, he could not do so without a doctorate.
So Quinn turned to personal projects, the first of which was a remote control-operated mobile device operated by donated solar panels. The device, affectionately named the MESA mobile, was largely built from an out-of-pocket budget.
However, equipping a lab where students could also take part in future projects was a hurdle with less-than-plentiful funds. The opportunity came two years later when the department received a $30,000 grant — enough for all of the equipment needed to set the solar panel on the roof and connect it to the lab.
By 2011, the MESA lab was ready to double as a classroom for students curious about sustainability.
This summer, eight students from Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda volunteered to participate in a workshop led by Quinn in the MESA lab. The group spent five days in August building solar power systems which connected to the solar panels on the roof.
“It was kind of an ad-hoc thing where we wanted to get their feet wet in solar power,” Quinn said, adding, “Them coming was like the christening of the lab to teach.”
In September, Quinn sent out an email through the engineering college’s listserv informing students about the opportunity to engage in alternative energy projects, and he was pleased with the student turnout of the first MESA meeting of the semester. While not all those students stayed on board, those who did said they are determined to bring their projects into fruition.
“It was a walk-on thing,” sophomore electrical engineering major and MESA member Chad Wallace said. “We all stayed because we’re excited about renewable energy.”
