Meet Kylan Robinson
Major: Computer engineering
Goal: Master’s in computer engineering; work to benefit impoverished areas worldwide
A course on the U.N. got Kylan interested in global affairs, especially the Rwandan genocide. Then he landed a summer internship in Rwanda, where he helped rural coffee-growers establish a computer network to market their product globally.
He worked side by side with WSU professors and graduate students setting up the network and training the members of the coffee-growing co-op in using and maintaining it.
To meet the challenges of starting a technology-based business in the world's sixth-poorest country, Kylan had to think on his feet and look at the subject of his studies in a new way.
"We had to decide what Rwandans need in a computer. There are so many applications out there," he said. "What Americans need is not necessarily what Rwandans need. We had to think like someone who's never used a computer before."
After returning from Rwanda, with his professor’s sponsorship, he and his fellow students presented findings from their experience at an international technology conference in India, where they shared their unique expertise and perspective with researchers, professors, and industry experts.
Now he’s putting his first-hand experience to use as the team leader of his engineering senior design project: a solar power system for a hospital in Sudan. The hospital has been designed wholly by WSU students, with the aim of making it self-sufficient in a region without reliable supplies of electricity and clean water, and in which many construction materials and resources that industrialized countries take for granted are unavailable.
The Sudan hospital project is sponsored by the WSU chapter of Engineers Without Borders, and is planned to be built when political instability in the region subsides enough to allow construction.
“The thing I appreciate most about WSU is the global outlook. With our Rwanda internship, we’re now considered experts in this field, and I want to help other people who might be facing the same problems."
Life is good at WSU.
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