Students are scattered around the civil and environmental engineering lounge. Among them are four classmates with one focus: For a week, they’ve taken all their spare time to come here, to write.
The document they slave over is no term paper, but an open letter to the 2008 presidential candidates, asking a question that impacts everyone, regardless of political affiliation: Do they have a plan for improving energy policy and sustainability in the United States?
Shahzeen Attari (PhD, E’09), Inês Lima Azevedo (PhD, E’09), Benjamin Flath (MS, E’08), and Constantine Samaras (PhD, E’08) drafted the letter for the TEAMS competition (Tomorrow’s Energy Ambassadors, Managers, and Scholars), sponsored by Johnson Controls.
The teammates struggled to balance their research interests and opinions to form a singular message that would provoke a reaction, whether from the candidates or those who would read the winning letter published as a full page ad in USA Today by Johnson Controls.
They carefully considered each word, sometimes in meetings lasting hours. “We spent as much time together as you could in a week,” says Flath.
More than 200 schools submitted 900-word entries. Just a week later, Azevedo glanced at an e-mail from David Dzombak, the faculty director of the Steinbrenner Institute for Education and Research, who organized the students for the contest. She stared in disbelief. Then she turned to Samaras, her officemate as well as teammate, and with surprised excitement declared, “We won.” They immediately called Attari, who was with Flath in the lounge where all four had spent many hours together.
Now the inspired students wait to see whether their published letter will change the course of the presidential election.
—MICHELLE BOVA (HS’07)
