Hello,

My name is Júlia Toffoli de Oliveira, I’m 22 years old and I’m a Brazilian student from Porto Alegre. My major is Chemical Engeneering at PUCRS and I’m in my fifth year.

I arrived Houston at 06/08 and the first thing I noticed is that the weather here is really hot and Friday, the day I arrived, Caz and Sammi gave us a tour through the university, our dorms and the OEDK facilities. It’s an amazing university with a lot of options for the students, so it’s pretty big and the infrastructure here is excellent. During the weekend me, Rebeca and Eduardo explored the University and the Rice Village and it’s pretty nice here.

So the first week working in the OEDK was fun, we got to know our team, we made presentations about our countries, we deconstructed a Honda engine (it was a very interesting and new experience), we did challenges such make a structure to hold a heavy book only with paper and tape and we visited the Houston Zoo as showed below in the pictures.

            

 

After that our week started to get more academic so there was so much learning about Engineering Design through videos and quizzes. This part is very important because we were able to start in our small project during the Boot camp that is happening till next week, so for the project we were divided in 3 small groups and we need to build an enrichment device for the Tapirs in the Houston Zoo.

So that’s it for the first week.

See you next week! Bye.