“Promoting Students to Imagine, Share and Explore Technology for a Better World”
YIP organises student projects aimed at solutions for socio-humanitarian problems. For 2014-15, YIP has started a new student internship programme in collaboration with Ingeniers du Monde(IDM), Indian NGOs, partners and universities targeted to allow students to do innovative projects for a 3-6-month duration for EPFL/UNIL students. The students will receive credits for their internships and accreditations though our academic partners. We plan to send at least 10 students for the 2014-15 for this unique learning opportunity under this theme.
Project Call 1:
In the project context of YIP we have collaborated with the dynamic student association Ingeniers du Monde (IDM) to start a joint student internship programme to allow students to go to in India for an internship or short project. Our first Indian partners for this programme is Amrita University, India, a high-quality, world-class university, focusing on technology and research, dealing with very concrete issues which have immediate applications and ranked in the Ivy League of Indian universities. Amrita University has recently launched the Live in Lab programme open to both graduates and undergraduates students. The parent organization is an NGO known worldwide as “Embracing the World” and have recently adopted 101 villages, so our students will be given an opportunity to serve in one of those villages. Essentially the live in lab will be a ‘laboratory’ set up in each of these villages. Foreign students along with Amrita students and their mentors will stay in one of the live in labs based villages.
These live-in-labs have varied focus areas such as energy, water, healthcare, education, waste management, ICT , skill building etc. These students will be the part of the interdisciplinary team of students and faculty and each team will be guided by a group of 2-3 faculty, also drawn from across the disciplines from all participating universities. The students will share village life and observe and understand problems encompassing health and hygiene, energy, water, waste, environment, etc., touching the villagers’ lives, and define projects that seek to address these problems, devise solutions, implement, test and eventually demonstrate innovative solutions. Students can identify a problem that interests them choose that as their project and try to device a solution for their problem.
Once the students arrive at Amrita, they will have to go through a brief orientation session, where the students will be made aware of the particular village and the challenges. There will also be courses that students can enroll into, for which they will receive credits. The students may choose the credit course based on their interest and these credits could be transferred to their home university. Students can do the course either after or before their village trip. Even if they are unable to develop a solution while they are in the village, they could go back to the home universities and work on the solution.
One definitive achievement of being a part of this LIL is that, students will receive a deeper understanding of challenges faced by emerging and developing countries. Once the students go back they can continue the collaboration through different means including video conferencing. If the students are interested they can again come back to implement the solution.
For more info about the projects please click here
Additional info
http://www.epfl.ch/campus/associations/list/yuva/
http://idm.epfl.ch/
http://www.amrita.edu/