MISSION
Our mission is to inspire students to be proactive and contextually-aware Engineers who empower communities to attain their basic human needs in a sustainable manner.
Engineers Going Global is a student-run project incubator that provides fellow students the opportunity to apply engineering principles learned from the classroom to real-life problems in order to find sustainable solutions for the local and international communities. By providing resources such as networking, workshops, and funding for our members, we are able to guide each project through five phases.
Engineers Going Global was originally established in 2004 as Engineering Students Without Borders (ESWB). ESWB was backed by Garrick E. Louis, PhD, an Associate Professor in the Systems and Information Engineering Department at the University of Virginia and leader of many humanitarian projects and research studies across the world. Professor Louis’ vision for ESWB was a student-run organization dedicated towards providing sustainable solutions to problems faced in both the local and international communities.
Over the past 14 years, ESWB has more than lived up to Professor Louis’ expectations. We have conducted projects all across the globe, including FOUR continents and in countries such as South Africa, Armenia, and Nicaragua, amongst others. In the United States, we have provided services across the Charlottesville-Albemarle area and even conducted work with Indian reservations in North Dakota!
EGG project members build sustainable water purification infrastructure in Nicaragua.
In 2016, due to an unexpected copyright issue with the national organization of Engineers Without Borders, we changed our name to Engineers Going Global and underwent a rescoping process to provide better results for our members and the communities that we serve.
Unlike our name may suggest, we are open to all students at the University and currently have students from the Architecture school, Global Development Studies, and the Curry School of Education. We feel that the the engineering design principles are present in every project, even those with seemingly little to do with engineering. By providing guidelines and phases for our project teams, we are simultaneously pushing these projects forward and teaching the engineering design principle through hands-on application. In addition, we promote diversity amongst our project teams, believing that such diversity will produce the highest quality results and provide the best experiences for our project members.
If you are interested in learning more about our current project teams, please visit the “Projects” tab.
If you would like to work with EGG as either a team member, faculty adviser or community partner, please visit the “Get Involved” tab.