Aviva Meyers, of Laguna Beach, CA, won the 2015 $500 Region Nine Grosswirth-Salny Scholarship.
A solar-powered water purifier could save lives in impoverished areas that lack both potable water and electricity. I have been designing such a device with a team of five other advanced chemistry students under the guidance of our teacher.
This extracurricular service project, linked to my Advanced Chemical Research class, has changed me in several ways. For the first time, I’m using my schooling and abilities to have an impact on the real world. I’ve learned how much can be accomplished when members of a team contribute unique skills. Above all, the experience taught me that I don’t have to specialize in one narrow field. I’ve always been interested in many academic areas. I love creative writing, founded the creative writing club at school and have won writing awards. But I also lean toward science, particularly chemistry. Social studies, especially international affairs, have fascinated me since middle school. That’s how I became active in Model United Nations, where I’m now Secretary General, the top position in a club of more than 100 students, assigning and grading position papers and organizing conferences.
It seemed to me, though, that in college I would have to pursue one major, one agenda. My involvement with the InvenTeam taught me otherwise. Our team worked throughout summer to design the sterilizer and write a grant proposal for MIT, which awards 15 such grants nationwide each year. We contacted professors, scientists, and distributors in the water sanitation field; we researched patents and calculated the size of each component. As the primary writer of the grant proposal, it was also my job to pull all the disparate pieces of information together into a persuasive, science-based appeal for a grant.
I also found a place to pilot our invention. As leader of Model U.N., I work with the Oololaimutia Elementary School in Maasai Mara, Kenya, where our club donates school supplies. I reached out to my contacts there, including the village schoolteacher, who are happy to help pilot the sterilizer. Their contaminated well water regularly sickens their schoolchildren, they said, and with no modern sanitation, people relieve themselves near the river banks, which fouls the river.
In early September, I sent the proposal to MIT. We also entered the TEDxOrangeCoast Teen Innovation Challenge, one of three TED-affiliated (Technology, Entertainment and Design) competitions worldwide for teen projects that have a measurable, helpful impact. Our Clean Water Kenya project won first prize; a patent lawyer offered pro bono help in patenting the device. Soon after, we won a $10,000 Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam grant from MIT for “technological solutions to real-world problems.” We hope to deliver the sterilizer to the Maasai village by summer.
This experience has transformed my vision of the future. I plan to engage in a multidisciplinary course of study–I have found programs at several universities that are perfect fits–and, after college, open a nonprofit organization that funds and develops low-cost technologies to aid developing countries. Now it is clear: I am at my best when my favorite pursuits and abilities are combined. I can write, invent, negotiate and contribute to the world all at once. I don’t have to leave any of myself behind.