A Personal Reflection Gap
A week and a half ago, folks from the Cansbridge Fellowship visited UBC to pitch the fellowship to prospective applicants and to give interested students an opportunity to chat with existing Fellows. During this event, I was fortunate enough to briefly chat with Ali, a 2021 Fellow, who, after introductions, asked me what I wanted to do. For the past couple months, I’d been allowing myself to seriously consider what I wanted to do for my summer 2025 internship, with the broader goal of distilling my various interests into a form that would fit traditional full-time engineering roles.
“Sustainability”, I answered Ali, “I’m passionate about sustainability, specifically renewable energy”. Now, in the majority of my conversations with fellow students and my friends, my statement would’ve gotten responses along the lines of “Oh interesting, where do you want to work?“. However, Ali followed up with something different. “Why are you passionate about sustainability?“.
I immediately knew I didn’t have an answer. This shocked me. I had been interested in green design and renewable energy since I was in high school, and for the longest time had felt certain that this was the field I wanted to work in. Yet, I couldn’t answer the simple question of why I was passionate about sustainability in the first place. Searching for an answer, my mind latched onto technologies like thermal batteries, radiant cooling, and passive buildings. However, I knew these weren’t reasons I was passionate about sustainability - these were just ideas I was mildly interested in that I could point to deflect from my inner uncertainty about the philosophies and components of sustainability that resonated with me.
With Ali waiting for an answer, I tried to dig deeper into my motivations on-the-fly (I knew from my First Leadership Experience exactly how that would turn out), making vague and shallow statements like “I don’t like the direction the world’s going today” and “I want to reduce society’s materialism” with a sinking feeling in my stomach. I eventually trailed off and said with a weak smile, “obviously, you can tell I don’t really know.”
Ali nodded, having understood before me that I didn’t know my own motivations. “If you’re passionate about something, you can speak straight from the heart,” Ali said. “You don’t need to think about it, and you should be able to talk about it for hours,“. Thinking back to experiences like UBC Solar, I completely agreed with this sentiment.
Leaving the Fellowship event, I felt extraordinarily grateful to have been forced to face my uncertainty sooner rather than later (for example, during a interview). I understood that I’d need to strip back the layers of assumptions I’d previously made about my interest in “sustainability” to reveal the truth about my motivations and passions. Fundamentally, I’d need to reframe the question of “what do you want to do” and instead ask “why do you want to do”?
My Core Value
To discover why sustainable development resonated with me, I started with the basics - since elementary school, I knew that I wanted to make a positive impact on the world around me.
Helping People
My dad brought me up on the principal that we should put in the effort to help people around us, simply because we have the capacity to do so. I remember being about eight or nine driving with my dad on a windy, rainy night. We passed a bus stop, where there was a single person waiting for a bus that would probably take another 20 minutes to come. Without a moment of outward hesitation, my dad pulled over and offered the person waiting a ride to home.
My dad’s sister, Jinder, also inspires me to help people, but in a different way than her brother. As a librarian by career, she takes pride in connecting members of her community and the city at large to public services like book clubs, English language learning resources, and community centers. In her semi-retirement, she’s also a vocal neighborhood character - picking up litter while she walks her dog, making conversation with folks on the street, and generally making her neighborhood feel more vibrant and connected.
In high school, I manifested these fundamental family sentiments of helping people by giving my friends a hand with their math, physics, and science homework. In grade 11, I began 1-1 tutoring at Smart Kookie Tutorials and later joined Math4Me to tutor small group sessions. At the same time, I started volunteering at Mount Pleasant Neighborhood House as a 1-1 tutor and progressed to tutoring groups of high school aged kids. Later, I also lifeguarded and taught Red Cross Swim Kids classes at Hillcrest Community Center.
Expanding Individual Impact
During my time at MPNH, I began to realize the limitations of my actions as an individual volunteer, while at the same time having my responsibilities broadened by my mentor and lead, Morie*. Morie did an excellent job of recognizing when I was ready for another challenge at MPNH, and I noticed the amount of folks impacted by my responsibilities increase as a result. My last role at MPNH was as the interim lead of the Digital Literacy Program. As lead, I collaborated with 5 of the other programmers at MPNH, coordinated 6 volunteers, assisted more than 20 program participants, helped run a booth signing up participants and volunteers at Vancouver’s 2021 Car Free Day, and connected with the folks running a Digital Literacy program working in the Downtown Eastside. By recognizing and nurturing my ability to push myself and grow into increasing responsibility, Morie elevated my impact from one learner to more community members than I can count. **Note: Morie’s successful leader traits are discussed more deeply in Managers vs. Leaders
Zong May and her three children - amazing folks I supported with English and digital literacy tutoring
Building on my dad’s foundation of helping individuals, my aunt’s enthusiasm with which she welcomed people into her neighbourhood, and Morie’s ability to multiply my community impact, I’ve been able to concretely define my core value as “connecting people to community”. I feel that the power of connecting people to community is to encourage them to draw from a community’s spirit, and, in doing so, evoke in them a feeling of ownership over that community, leading them to give back and reinforce the community with their own committed energy.
An Example from UBC Solar
I put this philosophy of “connecting people to community” into practice during my time as the Electrical Lead of UBC Solar. In 2022, as new executives planning the team’s future, the Captain, Mechanical Lead, and I pinpointed that the team’s largest problem was a lack of experienced, motivated members. This was due to the fact that members kept sporadically leaving the team, which was in part a result of previous leads not doing enough to connect their members to the community of UBC Solar. In the past, leads wouldn’t provide the necessary technical guidance and structure to the projects assigned to members - thus, when members would inevitably struggle, the leads would finish the project on their own, leaving the member with little learning and reduced technical confidence. This lack of support also increased the burden of work on the leads - the same cycle would repeat for the next project assigned to members with an increasing deficit of structured technical knowledge.
Drawing on my experience as a teacher, I understood that I could multiply my individual value as a lead by scaffolding the team’s approach to project ideation, execution, and learning. I then focused on reinforcing these supportive frameworks within the team’s members through consistency and repetition to instill first a sense of confidence and independence, and finally a feeling of ownership over the team’s growth and progress.
Getting the car ready for competition with Saman, the present Electrical Lead of UBC Solar
When the Captain, Mechanical Lead, and I transitioned out of UBC Solar after our competition in July 2024, 10 out of 11 subteam and executive leadership positions had a committed incoming lead who had been working with the outgoing lead for at least four months. Additionally, each subteam had a strong group of returning members that would maintain the immense momentum the team had developed over the last year and a half.
Sustainability
After identifying my core value of “connecting people to community”, I wanted to analyze how, if at all, it connected to my passion for sustainability. I started with asking myself what I meant when I said “I have a passion for sustainability”, and came up with three integrated points.
- I’m worried about humans using up our world’s available resources, and am certain that we cannot go on living our current lifestyles without destroying them within our lifetimes.
- As a result, I want to focus on engineering ways to use less energy in our built environment. A tenant I gained from Solar was maximizing what you can do with a set amount of renewable energy through clever engineering alone.
- I am confident that through engineering a society valuing minimal, renewable energy use, our individual spirits will be nurtured as we grow the connections to our local communities.
Thus, my vision is to connect people to community through the process of building a sustainable society - a fundamental step of which is to reduce the amount of energy that we use in our built environment.
The Link Between Sustainability and Community
While pleased with the vision I’d formulated from my values and passions, I felt I was missing an explanation for my confidence that the creation of a sustainable society through reduced energy usage in our built environment would create meaningful connection to community. Reflecting on readings and speakers that have resonated with me in the past, I believe it’s because of the fundamental connection between sustainable urban planning and sustainable energy use.
I want to challenge this conventional, irrational vision of a “sustainable society”
My passion for renewable energy arose from my passion for architecture and urban planning. As a child, my dad would take out eco-house books from the public library, whose pictures I would pour over, loving the way the natural light entered these airy spaces, evoking a sense of peacefulness and connection with nature. I would build little cardboard house models out of shoeboxes and toilet paper rolls, imagining houses that would evoke this same sense of calm. In high school, I started to connect more with my city, biking to go visit my friends, and volunteering in the community. I began to think more about why my city, Vancouver, was such a great place to live, and how to solve the problems like unaffordability, homelessness, and sustainability that I was increasingly researching. I was drawn to methods for rearranging our urban spaces - from schools to neighborhoods - that focused on strengthening the communities they served.
Through the investigation of progressive urban planning theories - particularly those following the foundations set out by Jane Jacobs in her book The Life and Death of Great American Cities - I realized that reducing the energy consumption of our societies, and effective community-centered urban planning go hand-in-hand. I recently discovered this thought process follows the tenants of Regenerative Design, a philosophy popularized by Bill Reed, the co-founder of the LEED Green Building Rating System.
Jane Jacobs, urban activist and author of The Life and Death of Great American Cities
As examples of this integrated sustainable design philosophy, I’ll present the following urban planning ideas that the resilient city of the future must integrate:
- Public transit-oriented travel
- Increased dependence on local manufacturing
- Affordable, low-embodied carbon housing
- Resiliency to extreme weather
- District energy systems
Each of these ideas evidences the fact that progressive urban planning and sustainable development through a reduction of societal energy use are fundamentally linked, as is their relation to building and connecting people to strong communities.
My Next Steps
Now that I’ve condensed and articulated my high-level vision and motivations, I need to drill down on the concrete next steps that will begin scaffolding my learning and engineering mindset pertaining to energy reduction. I’m daunted by the scope of the challenges associated with changing the way a society lives and thinks, but I am fiercely excited to apply and grow my own systems thinking and technological mindset to cleverly engineer these changes. I’m currently focusing on reaching out to urban planners and sustainable engineering consultants who practice regenerative design to connect people to community. I want to understand their approaches to tackling the biggest challenges humanity has faced, and to get their opinion on how enthusiastic and dedicated young engineers can maximize their impact in creating a sustainable society.
That said, I’m also open to the possibility that the passions I’ve laid out may change in the future, as I discover more about the existing renewable energy and urban planning industries, or as I discover new areas where I can make a positive impact by connecting people to community.
Closing out, I want to extend a thank you to Ali for sparking this reflection - I feel that I better understand my motivations around why I want to pursue sustainable energy engineering. I’ve not only defined my core value, but I’ve also re-framed the mental conversations I’ve been having with myself over the past month related to what I want to do as a career, taking a more wholistic view of what I’m passionate and curious about and relating in back to my vision of positively impacting the world by connecting people to community.