Living an Impact-Focused Life

What’s your Why?

I believe I was put on this earth to…

make others happy and make myself happy. In order to do this, I have to find experiences or things that make me happy such as plants. It’s a journey not something that can be done easily. I believe that making other people happy is important since it makes me happy, and I enjoy seeing other people be happy. I try to do what I can to make people smile or at least be conscious of the affect of my words on others.

 

My purpose is to…

help people live their best life and I believe that is why I am so interested in entering the biomedical field or even participate in projects like these because I understand the potential impact.

 

 

I believe (my core values)…

that respect, diversity, and inclusion is vital to any environment whether it be a classroom or professional setting.

 

 

The one thing I must do before I die is…

adopt 10 cats and open a plant/café/cat shop.

 

 

My advocates and supporters all believe that I…

sometimes push myself too hard or set very high standards for myself which cause me to break down easily if I don’t achieve them.

 

The evil I want to eradicate in this world is…

evil people such as racists, homophobes, or anyone that really prays on the downfall of others for their own gain.

 

I want to work in order to…

earn a living for myself and be a part of an industry that is working towards improving the health of people.

 

Walk the Talk – Your How

If you are truly committed to your Why, you show it in your everyday behavior. It is all air until you do it. Working from your Why, How do you prove that you are true to your Why in all you do?

 

I always…

attempt to create a space where everyone feels safe and try to provide guidance/advice to those who are going through a similar situation as I did. I try to help out, so they don’t have to go through the long journey that many bumps but instead be on a journey that signs guiding them where to go but still with a few bumps on the road.

 

I never…

try to hurt people on purpose, it goes against my goal of making others be happy.

 

My work style is…

take it day by day instead of cramming it all in one day. It makes me feel less stressed and allows me to check off that I was productive.

 

I try to treat people…

with respect and how I would like to be treated.

 

I approach problems by…

first developing a strong understanding of the problem then figuring out what has already been done to then how can I combine all those ideas or build on one of them to solve the problem at hand.

 

Victories are time to…

celebrateeeeeeeeee.

 

If someone attacks my point of view I…

first try to understand where they are coming from to help me understand why they are feeling the need to attack me.

 

If I fundamentally do not agree with what an organization or person is doing, I will…

tell them to their face what they are doing is incorrect and how to correct it.

Your Credibility – Your Whats

You have spent some considerable time at Lehigh, and specifically in the Global / Lehigh Valley Social Impact Fellowship, on many whats. Your whats include lab research, formal presentations, writing research papers, engaging with people in other cultural contexts, building prototypes, designing and building systems, raising funds, hiring employees, etc. The whats you have collected along the way are critical to your credibility when you are entering the workforce or applying to the best graduate and professional schools. They signify a credible currency to which organizations can assign value. Create a list of your Whats that are truly reflective of your Why & How. You did these things because you believe (Why) and you acquired them in the following (How) manner. These are examples you can use in interviews.

 

What Have I Done	List of Experiences, Accomplishments, and Lessons Learned
Degrees, Minors, Certificates, Fellowships	Material Science and Engineering Campus Sustainable Impact Fellowship
Research Experiences	Increasing efficiency of QDDSC and solar PV
Inventions and Innovations	N/A
(Social) Entrepreneurial Ventures	N/A
Publications (Formal and Informal)	N/A
Formal Presentations (at Lehigh and Beyond)	Presentations at Dow, CSIF Presentation, MountainTop Presentation
Awards and External Recognition	Gilman Scholarship, NACME scholarship

 

Articulating and learning from G/LVSIF-related Experiences. For each of these prompts, we want you to identify one and only one specific and compelling event/incident/experience/moment and identify exactly how you grew personally and professionally through that moment.

 

Teamwork Experience (and Lessons Learned)	Our first couple meetings with Dr. Romero were not organized in the sense that we had many tasks that were not delegated to anyone but instead just up in the air. As a result, things didn’t get done on time or at the last minute. We learned that we all can’t be doing the same thing because it is not optimizing our time. Instead, we should break into smaller teams and reconvene at a specific time and date to then see where can head next and provide feedback.
Conflict Resolution Experience (and Lessons Learned)	We were having difficulty setting up a time for testing which led us to waste a week. We learned that we all don’t always have to be there and that is okay. Instead, we can have people report back to those who were unable to go.
Leadership Experience (and Lessons Learned)	Teaching others how to make PCM and then slowly removing myself so they can learn on their own and be able to do next time without me. This taught me how to explain things in a manner that is easy for others to understand and will be applicable in any situation where I want to pass knowledge forward.
Dealing with Chaos, Ambiguity, and Uncertainty (and Lessons Learned)	We dealt with some chaos when it came to how we want to present our work. We wanted to go with one story but had some team members that wanted to talk about the combatting climate aspect of it. We comprised and concluded that we can include both since it spoke about the macro and micro perspective of the problem we are tackling with our project.
Personally Challenging Experience (and Lessons Learned)	I did not understand many of the terms that our advisor was using and instead of being clueless I decided to do some research on my own to both further my understanding and know how I can be involved in the conversation.
Cross-cultural Experience (and Lessons Learned)	We all come from very different background especially engineering disciplines. It has helped us with the creative problem-solving process an how to navigate such differences.
An experience that helped you connect your G/LVSIF work to your discipline / major.	Exploring the different types of materials we would want to use for the PCM and box was when I felt most connected to my Material Science and Engineering major
A moment that boosted your sense of agency and self-efficacy – you felt like you can speak for yourself, get stuff done, take on the world and make it better.	When it came to how we want to delegate work for the last presentation I believe I played a significant role in delegating what to do and how we want to be presenting, restricting our presentation entirely.
A moment where you felt like you truly have a strong sense of purpose and belonging in this dynamic, globalized, interdependent world.	I think it’s when we realized that our prototype can actually increase the efficiency by 5% and then put that into numbers and visualizations. Being able to see the potential impact.

 

Draw Your Life

What’s Your True North?

 

Create the story of your life. How do you want to contribute to the world through your talents, passions, and unique strengths? Think about your values, the roles you play, what gives you a sense of purpose, and ultimately, what you have to offer by being your best, authentic self. Draw a picture of your life as you envision it. Be remarkable. Be yourself.

 

CINQ 387: Inquiry to Impact Workshops

Lessons Learned – blog entry 

Due Mon 11/21 (CSIF) or Tues 11/22 (G-LVSIF)

Instructions: In preparation for the final workshop on “Living an Impact-Focused Life,” consider the three main questions below as a reflection on your Impact Fellowship. Regard this reflection as a learning process to explore and express what you learned, as well as an opportunity to learn more about yourself. Focus on the three main questions. You may use the prompts to help you organize your thoughts, but these prompts are not aimed to limit your thinking. You are strongly encouraged to freely express your ideas and feelings.

 

1. What are the top three things you learned during your Impact Fellowship? Please elaborate.

Prompts: When elaborating on each thing you’ve learned, ask yourself four questions: 

What did I learn?

How did I learn it?

Why does it matter?

What will I do in light of it?

 

For example, if you modified your understanding of a course concept through the IF, here are the questions you may ask to elaborate on what you’ve learned:

 

What is the concept? What specific occurrence relates to the concept?

How did the experience help you to better understand the course concept?

How did the concept help you to deal with any challenges or issues?

What complexities do you see now that you had not been aware of before?

Based on your analysis, what might you do differently in future academic activities?

 

The top three things I learned during my Impact Fellowship were the importance of building relationships with potential stakeholders both in and outside of Lehigh as well as how to incorporate ethics into a business and the different types of organizations that exist. I learned these through the classes taught by Khanjan where he would use slides, videos, TED talks, real-life scenarios, and research papers. Learning about the importance of building relationships with stakeholders was essential because I never realized how important it is for scaling a project. Without the stakeholders, there is no one to support the project with either funds or connections to make it bigger. Ethics was also extremely important to learn because it further reinforced that the best idea might not be the most ethical and that is important to consider the consequences and benefits. Also, learning about the different types of organizations that exist is important in order to understand what type of stakeholders we wanted to interact with for our project. In light of this knowledge, I will incorporate it once I decide to work on my own project of building my plant business/store. I believe that these three takeaways will help me in making choices and connections that will help me grow my dream. 

 

2. How did the Impact Fellowship facilitate your professional development? Please provide three examples.

Prompts: When elaborating on each experience that may facilitate your professional development, ask yourself four questions: 

What did I learn or what did I learn about myself related to professional development?

How did I learn it?

Why does it matter?

How will I make use of this experience?

 

For example, if you realized that you learned some skills (which can be general skills such as critical thinking, systems thinking, cross-cultural communication, ethical decision making, leadership, or discipline-specific skills) that relates to your professional development, you may ask these questions as a reflection:

 

What is the skill? How does it relate to your professional development?

How did the experience help you to strengthen the skill? What did you do to build this skill? How did the skill help you to deal with some challenges?

What do you see now that relates to your career plan that you had not been aware of before?

Based on your analysis, what might you do differently regarding your professional development in the future?

 

The Impact Fellowship facilitated my professional development by helping me develop/improve some skills such as how to work on a cross-functional team, read research papers, and build relationships with professionals. In the industry, I am interested in which is biomedical, working on a cross-functional team is vital because there will not only be one type of engineer. There will be biomedical engineers, and process control engineers but even aside from the varying disciplines people will be coming from different background. By being on a six-person team with a mechanical engineer, energy engineer, and chemical engineer, I was able to learn how they think and how to navigate a project even despite our differences in thinking. There were definitely some bumps in the road but I think that really helped our team grow and helped me learn even more ways how to deal with challenges in such a large team setting. Improving my skill of reading and understanding research papers is another vital skill because that is something I will definitely be doing all of my life if I plan to enter the biomedical field. There are always innovations occurring on medical devices and it’s important to stay up to date by reading research papers. It’s not only the fact that I can read them but also know how to decipher information from them that will further my knowledge of the topic. I improved this skill by reading many research papers on what is currently being a phase change material and other efforts that are being made to improve the efficiency of solar panels. Also, learning how to build relationships with professionals is very important because as an engineer I will always be collaborating with other engineers. It is important to know how to make a relationship beneficial for me but also for the other party so it is not just one-sided.

 

3. How did the Impact Fellowship help you grow personally? Please provide three examples.

Prompts: When elaborating on each thing that has helped you grow personally, ask yourself: 

What was the personal growth?

How did I achieve it?

Why does it matter?

What will I do in light of it?

 

For example, if you became aware of some personal strength, weakness, assumption, or belief, you may elaborate on it by answering the questions:

 

What is the personal strength, weakness, assumption, or belief you became aware of as a result of reflection on your experience?

How did the experience help you to better understand or develop this personal characteristic? How did this personal characteristic influence your interactions with others?

What are the potential personal benefits or challenges related to this personal characteristic in other aspects of your life?

In what specific way(s) will you use this strength, improve upon this weakness, etc., in your life in the future?

The Impact Fellowship has helped me realize that I enjoy working on a cross-functional team, sometimes have difficulty voicing my opinion, and should continue working on my presentation skills. As mentioned previously, my team was very diverse and it really helped me realize that I want that to occur even as a professional. I enjoy that everyone has a different way of thinking due to either their upbringing, engineering discipline, or any other factor that makes them unique. There are some big benefits to this since most jobs I am applying for are looking for candidates that interested in working on a cross-functional team and that is something I can strongly say I would love to do/be a part of. I also realized that I sometimes have difficulty voicing my opinion but I think that is because our team was so big so there would always be ideas jumping around so sometimes it would be difficult to just focus on one. I did realize though that I rather talk one on one with individuals. It allows me to listen better to what the other person is saying and I know that the individual will only be listening to what I have to say. I also realized that I should continue immersing myself in activities that challenge my presentation skills. I tend to get very nervous and it can sometimes show. I want to be more confident in this area so I will most likely take a class that helps me improve this skill. This skill is very important since it is very likely that I will presenting a lot in my job to higher-level engineers about the work I am doing. 

 

From the “Story Elements” framework slides, CHOOSE ONE of the frameworks given.

As a Project Team, construct a story about your project using the five story elements in the order in which they are given, #1 through #5. Each element should have one or two carefully constructed sentences.

The result should be a coherent, beginning-middle-end story about your project that someone who is unfamiliar with your project can follow and understand. The blog entry should be written as a story, not a numbered list. You can write it as a first-person plural story, in other words, the character can be “we.”

If you wish to make it longer than the 1-2 sentence-per-element length, have at it! Just make sure you are following the structure.

Talk it through as a team. Does it make sense? Does it say everything you want and need it to say? If this were the structure of your final presentation (stretched out to 7 minutes), would it be successful, and would the referees know what you were talking about and why?

Sections:

1. Attention-getter – make us listen
2. The Challenge – state or frame the problem as a world-level challenge.
3. The Journey – explain your methodology in an active, action-oriented way.
4. The Battle – describe how, with the help of your allies (partners), you have or will overcome the challenge.
5. The Change – state the solution/outcome/catharsis of this story.

Story:

We are Thermosolar, and we are increasing photovoltaic efficiency by at least 5% through solar panel cooling. In efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change, the world is transitioning to cleaner fuels and renewable energy, but solar power is not very efficient. As the temperature of the panel increases, the amount of power output decreases. Our approach involves attaching an enclosed box filled with phase-changing material (PCM) to the back of a panel. Our team conducted experiments to measure the differences in power output of solar panels with and without commercial-grade calcium chloride PCM using different ingredient formulas for the PCM and sizes of PCM boxes. We also measured temperatures at the front and back of the panel to understand the thermal changes occurring over time with and without PCM as well as the latent heat of fusion of the PCM. Tapping into the expertise of Dr. Romero, staff, and Ph.D. students at Lehigh’s Energy Research Center, we gained a stronger understanding of the type of PCM to use and the corresponding formula, the size of the PCM box, and the type of panel that would be more ideal for PCM to adhere to the back. Our experiments resulted in an increased solar panel efficiency via higher voltage from solar panels that were paired with PCM than one without PCM. Increasing the efficiency of photovoltaics by 5% can generate 140 kW more, allowing Lehigh to use more of its own generation on-campus and avoiding paying PPL approximately $21,000 a year.