Monday, June 03, 2013
Today was our very first day visiting the Universidad
Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL). Our university has formed a partnership with
them that allows us not only to work with their faculty, staff and students to
do our research, but to just enjoy ourselves getting to know them on a friendly
level too. As we showed up, we saw everybody waiting outside and peoples’
voices were put to a face as I finally met Veronica and Fausto who are my
primary advisors. For the students, their Facebook pictures came to life. Everybody
was a little bit shy and nervous and we didn’t have much time to talk, but I could
feel how excited everybody was to finally get started and get to know each
other.
After the brief meet and greet, we got a campus tour,
starting at the campus museum which is more of a Loja museum. From there we
went to the campus print press where they print not only some of their own
textbooks, but notebooks and other books that are shipped within Ecuador and
worldwide. It was pretty impressive. Some of these books were in the UTPL
library, which instead of being organized necessarily by the good ol’ Dewey
Decimal system, it simply organized by discipline so students can find books
more easily. Interesting…
From there we went to some of the other facilities on campus
which included a dairy processing factory, essential oil extraction area,
foodstuffs testing/production facility with a few research areas in between. I
have to say UTPL is top notch. It not only has these facilities, but allows
students to work in them. Further, the research and output of them has a lot to
do with the local community, so it’s not just contained in some obscure
research lab with no results. The essential oil area, for example, is helping
local communities determine more medicinal properties for these endemic plants
they are extracting, but also helping them to understand them more fully. And
not just so they can start exporting them and mass producing them. The dairy
facility sends its products to local grocery stores, too! The possibilities
seem endless.
The tour ended with a pass through the main laboratory
building. Comprised of 3 stories, the building is then loaded with smaller lab
rooms, each working on noteworthy projects—once again, related to relevant
local issues, species and peoples. Students and faculty in white lab coats
explained their research to us, and even though they explained it in impressive
English, my mind was still unsure about how they were doing all of this.
Expensive, shiny lab equipment adorned each room and I felt like UTPL made UI
look like a dump. Not only that, but because it is more of a math/science
institution, many of the students are involved with noteworthy research and
worthwhile majors. Yeah, I graduated with 3 degrees in 4 years, but none of
them involved looking for cancer cures…
Overall, the best part of UTPL was not its gleaming lab
equipment, but the passion and dedication of its people. Maybe I wouldn’t be an
ideal student here because science has always been my weak spot, but UTPL seems
like one of the few highly scientific places that sees the link between these
subjects and ties them to their social settings. At the end of the day, you can’t
cure cancer if you don’t care about people, right?
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