Day Zero

Today is officially the first day of my project with Universidad Don Bosco. I'm working at home most of the day, making revisions to my draft course outline based on feedback I got from my UDB counterparts when we met just before Christmas. At 3pm I'm going to the Antiguo Cuscatlán campus to meet with a couple of my collaborators.

So what is my project? Well, it's been kind of a moving target all along, ever since I first communicated with UDB people while writing my grant proposal. What we've arrived at is a three-part project:

1. I'm going to teach a class that will meet for three hours at a time on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for seven weeks starting in mid-February. The course will be an overview of renewable energy and energy efficiency. UDB is launching a new master's program in renewable energy, and the intent is to aim this course at people newly enrolled in that program, as well as interested faculty (some of whom will be teaching courses in this program in the long term) and any interested people who work in the energy industry.
2. UDB is interested in creating a campus-based clean energy lab or institute, perhaps something like the Schatz Energy Research Center where I work back home. I will work with them on developing this concept, figuring out how to fund and staff it, etc.
3. The university also wants to create a working renewable energy installation of some kind. No one is sure yet what that will consist of; one idea they brought up in our last meeting was a cogen system. I'm also going to work with them on developing this concept and hopefully taking it into the design and financing stages.

Whew! Looks like a plateful, right?

Universidad Don Bosco is a private Catholic university of the Salesian order. Their main campus is way over in the east end of the capital in the community of Soyapango. They have somewhere around 5,000 enrolled students. The much smaller grad campus is here in Antiguo Cuscatlán, in the southwest corner of the San Salvador metro area. Our apartment is just a five minute walk from the grad campus, which is where I expect to work most of the time.