Hello all!
Welcome to my blog, where I will be documenting my experiences in Malawi through the Rice 360 Summer Internship over these next few months. I’m indescribably excited for this summer, and I couldn’t be more thankful for this opportunity.

Before you commit yourself to spending several weeks following me and my blog posts, I should tell you a bit about myself.
My name is Hannah Andersen, and I’m a rising junior here at Rice University. I went to Prosper High School in Prosper, Texas, where my family still lives. I live at Lovett College, where I’m currently involved as the Outreach committee chair and Head Peer Academic Adviser. In my free time, I love pursuing the perfect cappuccino. I can often be found taking study breaks at Rice Coffeehouse or the Starbucks across the street from my dorm!

I’m pursuing a BS in Bioengineering with minors in both Global Health Technologies and Engineering Design, which means that I’ve spent a lot of time working on engineering design projects. Some examples of my past projects have been a physical therapy model for Texas Children’s Hospital and an exhibit for the Children’s Museum of Houston. My most recent and favorite project by far was through Rice 360’s design course: GLHT 360. This is where my teammates and I created OxyMon – a low cost monitor of oxygen concentration to be used on oxygen delivery machines in low resource settings in order to alert clinicians when patients are not receiving enough oxygen. Oxygen concentrator machines are vital for patients, especially infants, with respiratory distress. However, these machines break often, so our device aims to inform nurses and technicians about the concentration of oxygen actually being output by these concentrators and to alert clinicians when the concentrators are broken. One of my teammates and I will actually be taking OxyMon to Malawi (and Tanzania, in the case of my teammate, Matthew) this summer in order to get authentic feedback to guide our work on the device next semester! Very exciting.

Making more prototypes to travel with us has been the main task of this time spent preparing in the OEDK. Matthew and I have actually decided to roll out a second version of our device, which we’ve dubbed OxyTech, in order to get feedback on two different approaches to our problem space. This lead us to a super fun adventure to a store called Electronic Parts Outlet last week in order to get some supplies. Before then, I’d never seen so many different electronic parts at once, not even in ELEC 243 lab last semester. Most of our time lately has been spent planning for the building of extra prototypes of our old design (OxyMon) and the creation of initial prototypes of our new design (OxyTech). The goal is to make enough to bring two total to both Malawi and Tanzania – one OxyMon and one OxyTech per country.

From left to right: an image of the original OxyMon, the guts inside the original OxyMon, and some pre-assembled components and casing for the new OxyTech design

In addition to prototyping, everyone has been dedicating this time to the necessary preparations that come alongside international travel, such as getting vaccines and prescriptions for anti-Malaria medication (I just picked up 70 anti-Malaria pills yesterday! Boy, were they expensive). And of course, there’s the less official preparations, such as downloading a bunch of movies and music in anticipation for having unreliable wifi at our place of residence in Malawi.

These types of preparations are making the upcoming trip feel more and more real every day. Faced with equal parts excitement and nervousness, I am hesitant to preach to everyone around me that I’m about to have the Unequivocally Best Time of my Life™. Because my family is only five hours away from Rice, I have never gone this long without seeing them before. While my heart yearns to see more of the world, as much as I can, I know that this summer will be full of just as much homesickness as it will be full of wonderful new experiences. It’s going to be amazing, but it’s going to be hard, too. We’re going to have to learn how to take care of ourselves, how to balance a busy work schedule with basic tasks such as cooking and laundry (which I hear we’ll have to do by hand!), how to work on a team with people from very different backgrounds, how to “lead gently” as Dr. L says. If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far during my time here at Rice, it’s that I should not expect everything to go perfectly all the time. In fact, I should definitely expect lots of things to go wrong. I should expect myself to experience failures along the way. But, as the days go by and our departure draws nearer, I am focusing on the idea that it is through our failures that we learn the most. So, I can’t promise a summer of wild success stories where we all go to Malawi and save the whole world in one grand, victorious sweep. But, I can promise that I will work hard every day. I will work hard to lead a design team of students from Malawi and Tanzania, I will work hard to get feedback for OxyMon, I will work hard to engage in needs finding, I will work hard to get to know all the new people around me (both my fellow Rice interns and everyone in Malawi), I will work hard to understand a new culture, and I will work hard to improve myself both as a woman in engineering and as a human being. This is the learning experience of a lifetime and I will work hard to take advantage of that.

That being said, I also intend to have some fun along the way. 😉

Stay tuned for more posts in June when the adventure begins!

Cheers,
Hannah