Adrian Jones '16 and André Holzhacker Alves 6th year

Even though we’ve only spent a little over a week together in this collaborative course, having the ability to connect with experts, professors, and fellow students has already helped shape our path moving forward. The discussions we’ve had with all the people we’ve come in contact with has helped us generate new ideas and view the problems in both of our countries from different perspectives.

Among all the site visits, we found visiting several green buildings as well as the Cantareira reservoir to be especially interesting. Having an intimate view of the water crisis, yet seeing companies like Santander and those that occupied the Tower Bridge office utilize rain water collection systems opened our eyes to a logical contributor to the fight against the water shortage. 

Although, the importance of technical solutions was made even more clear to us through the trip, we found unfortunately that often political obstacles could prevent many solutions from ever seeing light. As engineers, we understand that we’ll have to learn how to deal with this reality.  

As we leave the course, we’ve gained several ideas that we hope to implement to progress cities toward sustainable futures. Being able to end the second to last day by interacting and learning from Brazilian entrepreneurs at the Lemann foundation, helped provide more form to our ideas.

We imagine the great friendship that has bound us all together in this short time will continue to enrich our lives and will likely lead to greater collaboration in the future.  For that, we are extremely grateful for all the trip’s organizers, lecturers, guides and everyone else who made this program possible.

Abraços