During our trip to Chile, there were a great deal of connections I was able to make to my future career in Engineering. We were able to tour many different energy sites such as an oil refinery, an ecological wetland, and a coal mine. Each of these sites provided me with different connections to my major and my career. As an engineer we are tasked with making safe and ethical decisions regarding the health of the general public. We are taught to keep ourselves to the highest of standards when making any ethical decisions.
When we toured the oil refinery, we learned that recently they had started a new project with the local marine biologists. They were trying to restore the natural wetlands in the area. This is an example of a company trying to be ethically responsible. By creating an environment that will help improve the life of the local wildlife and also the surrounding community for the people that live there, this company is making the conscientious decision to give back.
Sign In Front Of Wetland Park
The Wetland That is Being Restored
We also had a chance to tour the copper mine, specifically the old town where many of the miners and their families lived before. In 1945, there was a large smoke tragedy at the El Teniente, which forced the Chilean Mining industry to reevaluate the safety conditions of mines. This is another example of how engineers have to take responsibility of the safety and health of their communities. Engineers today who design mines make sure there are multiple evacuation routes for miners and other safety precautions put in place to protect the workers. This is very relevant to the job I will be going into, because I will be helping to design assembly lines and I need to make sure that the tools and surrounding areas in the factory provide a safe environment to the workers who will be on the assembly line. Today we have a lot more technology and knowledge from past events to make sure we can create a safe environment for everyone.
The Penn State Group At the Mining Town
Safety and health are key factors in the decisions that engineers make, however, another major part of engineering is being able to interact with people of various backgrounds and be able to work with them and understand their ideas. I had spoken in my other post about how we got to eat with a chilean family for dinner one of the nights. This was such a great experience because there were times when we had to figure out alternative ways to communicate our ideas since we didn’t know very much spanish and they didn’t know too much english. This felt very familiar for me since I’ve had to work in international project groups where we had to sometimes communicate through drawings and models instead of words because of language barriers.
The trip, although advertised as a class for students in the environmental resource management department, was very relevant for me as an engineer because of common values shared between the two majors.