Summer Engineering: Ideas at Work
For these high school students, summer break includes learning about engineering and witnessing firsthand how engineers can have a huge societal impact.
Watch a video about the field trip and Rob van Haaren's solar array project.
As part of a summer high school program co-sponsored by Columbia Engineering and Columbia’s School of Continuing Education, students took a recent field trip to Rockaway Beach, Queens, to learn how solar arrays developed by Rob van Haaren, a PhD student in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, provided power to an area crippled by last year’s Hurricane Sandy. The course, taught by David Vallancourt, a senior lecturer in the Department of Electrical Engineering, focused on the engineering response to Sandy, further illustrating how engineers play a big role in community service and how they can quickly assist people and places after a natural disaster.