Hello! I am one of the two Rice360 interns in Malawi this year! I’m excited to tell you about my experience these next two months, but first, let me introduce myself!

My name is Paula and I’m from Spain. I graduated from Rice this year with a major in Bioengineering. I am interested in medical device design and in global health. I have also lived in different places throughout my life, so I love meeting new people and learning about other cultures. Moving often also makes me really appreciate the time I can spend with friends and family. Besides that, I also like being creative and always enjoy a good mystery.

During high school, I had the chance of participating in an ‘Immersion Programme’ in Zambia which had a long-lasting influence on me. While I had already wondered how someone like me could make a change in a limited resource setting before having then, it was not until I got to Rice that I learned about global health and the impact that engineering could have in places like these. I am so happy to have the opportunity to be here (yes, I am writing from Malawi already!) and to learn and experience this firsthand.

In this internship, I will be working on different projects, including one assigned by the host (the Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (MUBAS)) and a personal one, as well as getting feedback for different Rice360 technologies. I will also be doing needs-finding to identify different areas or situations where possible future projects could make a positive impact. With these experiences, I hope to learn as much as possible about design in resource-constrained settings, develop my intuition and creativity in doing so, and earn and develop different engineering skills. I also hope to contribute as much as possible in the development of global health technologies.

For quite a long time leading up to the internship, I worked on preparing everything needed for the trip. Other than the long list of items that you can likely already imagine, this included for example learning as much as possible about the Rice360 projects and obtaining supplies. But as I mentioned, I am already in Malawi 🙂 I arrived on Monday after a very long trip and have been writing this entry for the past few days. Below is a picture taken from the plane right after landing in Blantyre!

When we arrived, we were welcomed at the airport by our two fellow interns and the Design Studio Manager from MUBAS. On Tuesday, we familiarized ourselves with MUBAS, got introduced to a lot of people, started learning about the work for the next few days, and got help from the MUBAS interns with some other arrival tasks.

Next Tuesday is the NEST Program Phase 2 Launch in Lilongwe, so the Design Studio has been very busy working on some projects. To help with that, we were tasked, in pairs, with creating a User Interface for one of the projects. We have been focused on this work since Wednesday. It has thus been a very busy start, but I have gotten to learn new things already!

I feel like I will be able to gain a lot from this experience, both as an engineering and a citizen of this world, and I hope that I can also contribute to a positive impact through my work here. I only have a few pictures for now, but I wanted to share one more of a sunset from the lodge:

Until next time!