The first week of our Summer 2022 SEED program was filled with excitement and our spirits were high in anticipation of the amazing work that awaited us. 

Monday was a day for orientation and introduction to the program goals and expectations. We had the opportunity to interact and get to know other interns by sharing our interests and doing some interesting ice breakers. After the initial meetup we attended a Project Fair where excited clients presented on their different problems that we had to work on. There were 7 different projects that were presented, so we had to move around the different tables and ask questions for further clarification of the problems. Lunch came and passed. Then we were taken on a tour of the OEDK with special focus on safety and accessibility of different resources. We concluded the first day with some personal time to research and understand the projects. By the end of the day we had to submit a ranking of the projects according to our preferences. The whole day was an amazing success!  

On Tuesday everyone was very anxious about the project teams pairing results. The project leads and supervisors used the different project rankings that each intern had submitted to pair up interns into teams that would work on each project. I was assigned to the ‘Station’ project together with three other interns. We identified the Problem Statement as: ‘In low-resource settings, medical facilities often charge medical devices in suboptimal conditions due to lack of space or outlets. Sanitation issues increase the workload on the facilities, impacting infection prevention and control. The team must develop a low-cost solution that is capable of storing, charging, and sanitizing multiple different handheld medical and consumer devices in facilities in low resource settings. ” The rest of the day was time for us to get to know our teams and to set up our tables in the OEDK.

For the rest of the first week we focused on Clarifying Team Assignment. This involved doing background research and gathering as much information as possible within the problem space. In addition we did our client interview on Friday to gather information about the motivations, expectations, and assumptions of the client. The interview gave us a better understanding of the project’s objectives and their relative importances.

These are the highlights for our first week! Looking forward to an exciting second week!