Academic Support for Engineers Without Borders-USA Student Chapters: The Lafayette College Experience

The Lafayette College chapter of Engineers Without Borders-USA (EWB-LC) is a multidisciplinary service-learning organization focused on sustainable water distribution and sanitation infrastructure development in rural Honduras.Its mission is to create sustainable, community-oriented solutions to meet the needs of the communities and, secondarily, to train students to be globally and environmentally aware professionals.Because EWB-LC is organized at Lafayette as a student club, it predominately operates outside of the academic programs of Lafayette's Division of Engineering.In addition, EWB-USA policies regarding the mentoring of student work have evolved considerably since 2003, becoming more rigorous but also more restrictive.For example, EWB-USA requires student chapters to have at least one professional mentor with direct professional experience who participates in both the design and implementation of project work.Because not all faculty advisors are qualified to serve as the professional mentors or willing to travel on implementation trips, chapters must rely on noncollege-affiliated professional mentors.This creates challenges in both supporting and assessing the service learning occurring.This paper describes those difficulties and recent efforts to formalize the academic aspects of the program at Lafayette College.