The Impact of WAVES on Valpo Students

At Valpo, our students are mentored to be tomorrow’s servant leaders and are encouraged to seek out opportunities that will allow them to make a real impact in the world. Through the College of Engineering, students are testing the skills that they learned in the classroom during service trips with Working Across Vocations Everywhere through Service (WAVES). Civil engineering major Allison Yohanan ’24 shares the value of these projects and the true difference they make in the communities that they work with after three project-based service trips and her latest scoping trip, a venture to scout out a potential location for the group’s newest project.

“I would say these trips require the ability to learn and the ability to listen, especially with scoping trips. You need to listen to the people and not be overbearing,” says Allison. “A big thing from these WAVES trips is to listen and not force your solution onto them, but find a solution together and work together to implement it.”

Allison traveled to the Dominican Republic last November with Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering Jay Grossman and Assistant Professor of Education Selina Bartels to scope out their latest service project. Her role as vice president of WAVES afforded her the opportunity to be a part of the decision-making process and be placed in real world scenarios that demanded feasible solutions. 

She chose to join the scoping trip to help build up the relations that were lost with partnering countries during the pandemic. The purpose of the scoping trip is to meet with several groups who are in need of assistance, assess their areas of need, and decide whether WAVES would be able to provide the needed assistance. The process requires attention to detail, cultural sensitivity, and according to Allison, the very raw condition of simply being human.

“I learned the true value of resourcefulness because the people in the countries that I have been with have really shown us how to be resourceful,” Allison says. “You don’t always have everything at your disposal, and simple things that you might have at home are not available in the areas that you are working, so you need to look at things from outside the box to come up with a solution and a way to do something.”

For this year’s spring break service project, the team settled on a community that was in need of an ultraviolet water filtration system, which is more relevant to the field of civil engineering than the solar panel project that WAVES took on for their previous trip.

“Water purification is a little more related to civil engineering, but we have a computer engineer, Leah Pfister ’28, who has been really involved really early on,” Allison says. “She is only a freshman and she’s now our projects team lead. So having experience with a project that isn’t super directed at your major is actually really fun and interesting.”

The members of WAVES who will travel this year will be required to rely on efficient teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking and of course trusting one another to fill in the gaps from time to time. The team dynamics support an environment for learning, as not all of the students come from the same major.

“Our last trip when we were building the solar panels, there were four civil engineers, and civil engineering doesn’t really have anything to do with solar power so it was a big learning opportunity for a lot of us,” Allison says. “Actually, one of my friends is now taking a solar class because she enjoyed it so much on the trip even though it doesn’t relate to civil engineering, the WAVES project got her interested in solar energy.”

The work that students in WAVES accomplish on their trips is not easy, but it is purposeful and changes the lives of the communities that they serve. At the end of the day, the students walk away with a life changing experience and the satisfaction of sharing in the unifying strength of humanity.

“My favorite memory was our first day working in Nicaragua after we had just finished planning out our measurements for the solar panels,” says Allison. “After a long day of work, we just sat outside under the shade and enjoyed the breeze and appreciated what we had done together and what we would still do. You don’t have to be an engineer to go on these trips and really appreciate the experience.”

Thanks in part to Allison, WAVES was able to go to the Dominican Republic this past Spring break. Engineers installed a UV-powered water filtration system, while education students did their part to help educate local children on how the new system works. To learn more about WAVES, visit valpo.edu/waves.