Editor’s note: This is the fourth in an occasional series of stories on the measures that individual Schools at Harvard are using to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) is a rigorous world of applied mathematics, materials science, bioengineering, and other demanding disciplines.

But it is also a world in which nearly every common space includes green laminate signs or motion-control sensors to turn off lighting. The collective message: Be green.

Turn off the lights, wear a sweater, shut the sash on your fume hood. It’s not rocket science. Or, as they say at SEAS: It’s not quantum physics.

But simple steps like these — along with exacting building standards and other technical measures — have helped SEAS to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 11 percent from fiscal 2006 to fiscal 2009. That kind of progress also owes a lot to University-wide measures to save energy, said Edward P. Jackson, SEAS director of physical resources.

That number puts the School on track to meet the University’s ambitious GHG emissions goal of a 30 percent reduction by 2016, inclusive of growth, with 2006 as the baseline year.

SEAS tightened the University-wide standard for temperature set points by adjusting heating and cooling systems to start later and finish earlier. “We did it, and waited for complaints,” said SEAS manager of facilities Donald Claflin. “And there weren’t many.”

Saving energy is everybody’s business, from big energy systems to students who pause to shut off the lights. “It’s a lot of little pieces,” he said. “Everybody’s involved. Everybody’s a player.”

On the technical side, SEAS has installed efficient lighting in its five buildings, and on the two floors it leases at 60 Oxford St. It has also implemented an automated energy management system in the Maxwell Dworkin building, and examined its operating system through the lens of energy savings. By this fall, SEAS will have motion-detection sensors on lights in all of its operation.

“It’s many small steps,” said Fawwaz Habbal, SEAS executive dean. “Little drops of water on a stone will eventually make a mark.”

This kind of effort — assess, innovate, invent — is perfect for engineers, he added. “You give us a problem and we solve it.”

SEAS students, faculty, and staff also are exploring other pathways to sustainability. Some are personal-scale pathways. Custodian Joanne Carson sets aside coffee grounds in a composting bowl in the kitchen at Pierce Hall. People take them home for their gardens, she said.

Other pathways are on a bigger scale. For one, in fiscal 2009, SEAS recovered 60 percent of its recyclable waste, piling up 73 tons for the blue bin.

All SEAS buildings are covered by a green cleaning program that minimizes chemical use. And four LEED projects are under way at SEAS; one more is complete. (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a professional U.S. rating system for sustainable building.)

The SEAS Computing and Information Technology office has already been converted from 2,000 square feet of lounge space to three energy-efficient offices in Maxwell Dworkin.

At SEAS Northwest Labs B1, a LEED project now under construction will bring together researchers in medicine, engineering, biology, and applied sciences.

Renovations are ongoing at the SEAS Vlassak Lab and the Weitz Lab, both in the Gordon McKay Laboratory of Applied Science on Oxford Street. LEED-standard renovations are also taking place in two engineering science laboratories at 58 Oxford St.

“Labs are really challenging,” said Habbal. At SEAS, they are energy-intensive hives of complicated gear, from computers, fume hoods, and imaging systems to quantum-cascade lasers.

In addition, SEAS researchers there are looking into new sources of energy, African water resources, efficient computing, carbon sequestration, and the chemistry of climate change.

Sustainability, said SEAS administrative director Jennifer Casasanto, “is part of our dialogue.”

Sustainability is also about encouraging ideas. That means student involvement.

SEAS is part of an arts-science collaboration that helps students and faculty turn their ideas — many of them about green technology — into practical reality. The Laboratory at Harvard, located in the Northwest Science Building, is run by SEAS faculty member David Edwards, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering, along with SEAS staff member Hugo Van Vuuren.

A couple of ideas have already reached reality. One is the sOccket, a portable energy-making device shaped like a soccer ball. Kick, dribble, or throw it around, and the sOccket — rigged with inductive coil technology — stores energy. Prototypes have been tested in South Africa and Kenya.

Also, SEAS student Henry Xie ’11 developed the Harvard Reuse List, an online supply swap for students and staff.

Traditional classroom work touches on sustainability, as well. The oldest such class — and “a capstone experience for students,” said Habbal — is Engineering Science (ES) 96.

Students take on real-world issues at Harvard, then produce book-length recommendations for action. Past examples include energy use at Pierce Hall, the Blackstone complex, and Harvard athletic facilities and Houses.

SEAS classes in applied mathematics, environmental engineering, and climate studies deal with sustainability too.

It’s an issue that requires cooperation, awareness, collective action, and intensive study. “The bottom line,” said Habbal, “is mindset.”

In business, one well-prepared conversation can change everything.

Rebecca Kantar ’14 knows how that works. During a trip to Silicon Valley with other Harvard students, she sat down with a mentor to get advice on her young start-up, BrightCo.

She left that meeting with a verbal commitment for seed funding.

“I was in shock when I got back to the bus,” she recalls with a laugh.

Serendipity will always play a role in entrepreneurship, but it takes far more than a fortuitous meeting to translate an idea into reality. For Kantar, that one moment was backed by months of network building, ideation, and careful pitch preparation.

Here in Cambridge, an ever-expanding web of support, through teaching and advising, is helping students create new networks, gain hands-on experience, and ultimately make a difference in the world.

“In entrepreneurship, if you learn the process it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll succeed,” explains Fawwaz Habbal, executive dean for education and research at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). “But is it possible for me to help you through education to do extremely well? I think the answer is yes.”

That education starts in the classroom. Through hands-on courses that tackle real, challenging problems — like designing medical devices, using apps to combat gang violence, or enhancing sustainability on campus — students gain a rigorous exposure to the engineering design process.

“What these courses teach is extremely important; it’s how we generate ideas,” says Habbal. “It’s not sitting under a tree and waiting for an apple to fall on your head — that story is just not true. Newton spent 30 years working on that problem before it came to him, and Einstein did not simply come up with his ideas while he was an attorney reading patents.”

Increasingly, too, the engineering community at Harvard is blurring the lines between the classroom and the “real world,” teaching and supporting the design process from idea to implementation. In most high schools (and many universities), what happens in the classroom stays in the classroom. That’s not the case at SEAS, as freshmen soon find out.

Zachary Hamed ’14, for instance, took CS 50, SEAS’s introductory computer science course, in fall 2010 and developed Aid Aide as his final project. The website, reminiscent of tax software, was designed to help prospective college students navigate the federal applications for financial aid.

During the winter, Hamed worked out some kinks in the project through Hack Harvard, a student group that collaborates on software and apps, receiving valuable feedback that helped him prepare for the Harvard College Innovation (I³) Challenge last spring. Aid Aide won at I³, and Hamed received the $10,000 McKinley Family Grant for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Leadership in a Social Enterprise.

Meanwhile, Hack Harvard had connected Hamed with a business mentor, Andrew Rosenthal, a founder of Startup Tribe at Harvard Business School (HBS).

“He’s an email away from a chat over coffee,” says Hamed, who is a computer science concentrator at SEAS. “He’s invaluable for connecting with HBS. He knows exactly who to talk to.”

That relationship proved critical when Hamed discovered, last summer, that another company was developing a financial aid website in the same niche as his own. With Rosenthal’s help, he met with the other company’s venture capitalists, considered moving out to Silicon Valley to join them, and eventually arranged a deal to merge the two projects —a decision which allowed him to return to school at Harvard in the fall.

The bond between Harvard and Silicon Valley is a close one. The region is home to a powerful network of alumni willing to offer mentorship to students and recent graduates who are dreaming big. Taking advantage of that network, SEAS and HBS recently came together to organize the trip to Palo Alto over winter break.

Led by SEAS’s Habbal and HBS’s Tom Eisenmann, in concert with the Harvard Innovation Lab, the January Silicon Valley trip was a whirlwind tour. In just one week, 36 undergraduate and graduate students visited 14 technology companies, five venture capital firms, Stanford University’s design school, and still found time for nine expert presentations and panel discussions, as well as meetings with mentors and alumni.

“Silicon Valley” these days is a misnomer, as the region is no longer dominated by electronics manufacturers. The industry has also shifted away from the purely commercial “dot-com” companies that flourished 10 to 15 years ago. Today, Silicon Valley is synonymous with Web services like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Taskrabbit, and Cloudflare.

“That industry is bringing a lot of talent to Silicon Valley, and a very different type of talent than it was in the early 2000s,” says Habbal. “Our students in general are extremely well-equipped to do a lot of it, both in engineering and on the business side.”

Lauren Dai ’13, for example, grew up with a flair for business. As a kid, she would convince her friends to help set up garage sales at her house, and in her teens she started a tutoring business.

“Those little things add up, and then you figure out you really like doing this,” she says.

An economics concentrator at Harvard, Dai has co-founded the Cabot Entrepreneurship Series, which brings faculty and alumni to Cabot House as occasional speakers. Last year, she also served on the executive board of Harvard Undergraduate Women in Business, raising more than $120,000 as the club’s fundraising chair. She’s now responsible for cultivating mentoring relationships with the group’s alumnae and advisory board.

Like many others, Dai took CS 50 and has found that the trip to Silicon Valley has further solidified her interest in technology entrepreneurship as a career.

“I had thought … that it really takes someone with a good idea — the Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg-type person — and because they have such a good idea, they’re going to drop out of college and start their own company,” she says. “But the majority of the entrepreneurs that I’ve met are not that type of person. It’s just that they’re very driven and passionate about running businesses.”

“I really like the concept of having your own ‘baby’ to grow,” Dai adds, “and it’s not really as much of a risk as people make it out to be.”

Of course, entrepreneurship does carry a certain amount of risk. Does chance favor the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur once said?

Pondering this, Habbal recalls the student conversations he overheard on the bus rides between company visits in Silicon Valley:

“They started to think about their own potential businesses,” he says, “and when somebody suggested an idea, someone else would say, ‘But remember, that happened there, and it didn’t work.’”

For students like Dai and Hamed, Harvard provides an invaluable playground for experimentation and learning from trial and error. Between the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, the I³ Challenge, Hack Harvard, the President’s Challenge, and the Experiment Fund, the resources that support innovation right here in Cambridge are almost endless.

“We’re creating a generation of people who can deal with things beyond the classroom, whether it’s in doing design or trying to put it to work, to engage with the world,” says Habbal. “That’s extremely important

When Kathy Ku ’13 proposed to build a water-filter factory in Uganda for $15,000 last year, her contacts in other African countries advised her to double her budget.

Starting from scratch on a plot of land donated by Kumi University, in a country where 10 million people — a third of the population — lack access to clean water, Ku forged ahead. She and a team of Harvard College classmates rented a truck, negotiated an individual price for each building material (cement, wire mesh, and so on), and finished with $3,000 to spare.

“We didn’t know better, and we didn’t realize how difficult it would be,” Ku recalls. “But now we can construct a factory, apparently.”

When the factory needed a hydraulic press to increase its output of clay water filters, Ku asked around.

“They said, ‘There’s no way,’” she remembers. “Everyone said that in Uganda you couldn’t make them: You had to go to Kenya.”

Undeterred, and with help from the undergraduate teaching labs at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Ku bought a cheap hydraulic log splitter, dismantled it at her parents’ house in Illinois, and carried the components to Uganda in her suitcase. The scheme gave her a thorough introduction to Ugandan customs regulations — and solved the problem.

Driven by idealism yet grounded in solid engineering principles and cultural awareness, the project is anything but naïve. If all goes to plan, by next August Ku and her classmates will have created a fully functional and self-sustaining water-filter factory, employing 14 people and supplying clean water to households across Uganda at half the cost of imported filters.

Equally comfortable taking apart a diesel engine or quoting Adam Smith, Ku is the very picture of a Harvard engineer: fluent in hard science, intellectually well-rounded, and passionate.

Inspired by her early involvement with Harvard College Engineers Without Borders and her experience at a secondary school for Ugandan mothers in the summer of 2010, Ku enrolled in Harvard courses ranging from public health to technological innovation. As her interest in addressing the Ugandan water crisis grew, she recruited other students to help.

“I must have talked about it so much during dinner that somebody said, ‘Kathy, why don’t you just go for it?’ And before I knew it, I had a group of students who were interested in doing what I wanted to do.”

Suvai Gunasekaran ’13 (biomedical engineering), John Kye ’14 (economics), and more than a dozen other students joined the project, which they named “Sustainable Point-Of-Use Treatment and Storage (SPOUTS) of Water.” SPOUTS, now a registered nonprofit, has received support from across the University: the Committee on African Studies, Nectar and TECH at SEAS, and the Harvard President’s Challenge all contributed.

And Ku, who studied molecular and cellular biology as an undergraduate, is now a master’s student in engineering sciences at SEAS.

“No matter where you’re coming from, if you want to understand technology, if you want to make a positive impact in a technology-driven world, you belong in a SEAS classroom,” says SEAS Dean Cherry A. Murray. “This is ‘engineering for everyone.’”

Attracted by engaging courses and the real-world relevance of applied research, students are flocking to SEAS classrooms. Enrollment in SEAS courses and the number of SEAS concentrators have more than doubled since the School was established in 2007, filling lecture halls and laboratories to capacity — and posing new challenges for faculty and staff.

Enabling continued growth at SEAS is one of six top priorities of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ $2.5-billion Campaign for Arts and Sciences. SEAS aims to raise $450 million to increase the size of its world-class faculty; create modern instructional spaces for teaching, hands-on design, and laboratory research; invest in “innovation funds” for cutting-edge, high-impact research; and support talented students through graduate fellowships.

“Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is reimagining engineering education and research for the 21st century,” says FAS Dean Michael D. Smith, the John H. Finley, Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “What makes SEAS truly special for undergraduates is that, at Harvard, students receive world-class instruction in engineering as part of a world-class liberal arts education.”

SEAS is a place where one student can improve the outcome of cancer chemotherapy. Another, tinkering in the small hours of the morning, can help a tiny robotic insect take flight. A third can use mathematics and physics to understand human development. And insights from all three, cross-pollinating in a hallway conversation, could make extraordinary contributions to the future of science.

“It is not unusual for the ideas developed in courses and labs to take on a life of their own after the end of the semester,” says Fawwaz Habbal, executive dean for education and research at SEAS. “We are fortunate to have outstanding students, and we are very pleased to work with them and mentor them in a process that adds value. Given the right inspiration, the right mentorship, and access to resources, they have what it takes to change the world.”

For example, while taking an engineering sciences course called “Idea Translation” a few years ago, Jessica Lin ’09, Jessica O. Matthews ’10, Julia Silverman ’10, and Hemali Thakkar ’11 imagined a soccer ball that could generate enough energy during play to charge a cellphone or power a light in parts of the world where electricity is unreliable. They kept working on the project after graduation, and by July of this year, President Obama was kicking around a functional Soccket ball during a visit to Tanzania. “I don’t want to get too technical,” the president said, “but I thought it was pretty cool.”

Indeed, SEAS faculty, students, and alumni are improving living conditions around the world. Whether designing medical devices in India, improving a water supply in the Dominican Republic, searching for land mines in Cambodia, recycling electronic waste in Ghana, examining carbon emissions in China, measuring pollution over the Amazon, or tracing the flow of mercury in the Arctic, the impact of their efforts has been profound.

For the students working in Uganda, making a difference means understanding how to build change from within a community. Chlorine tablets could be an effective way to sanitize water, but in Uganda no one would like the taste; instead, the Harvard project’s clay filters complement existing practices, where water is stored in terracotta pots to cool.

SPOUTS also hopes to encourage participation by selling filters to individual households. “It allows people to take ownership and almost view the filters as a social status,” Ku explains. “Once that mind-set gets rolling, it becomes a commodity that becomes worth investing in.”

The SPOUTS model is designed to be sustainable long after the students have moved on. Partnering with nongovernmental organizations as distributors, Ku and her classmates will require that income from filter sales be used to create jobs and finance local projects.

“Solving complex global challenges requires holistic and long-range thinking. Our students gain that perspective through rigorous engineering courses, exposure to ideas from across the liberal arts, and hands-on practical experience,” says Murray. “The SPOUTS of Water project is tackling waterborne illness with real success.”

Eventually, when the filter factory no longer needs her, Ku hopes to attend medical school and then to move to rural Uganda as a physician. “I’m not a hardcore engineer, I’m not a hardcore biologist,” she says, “but I think it has allowed me to be a better leader.”

Music blared, LEDs blinked, and jaws dropped Tuesday at the SEAS Design and Project Fair, a celebration of creative problem-solving by students at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

The festival carries ideas from one scientific field to another and allows them to cross-pollinate. It also provides an incentive for harried students in the last few weeks of the semester to generate a polished and presentable final product. But most importantly, said Fawwaz Habbal, executive dean for education and research, the fair encourages “anyone, whether it’s for homework or their own self-expression, to go ahead and create something.”

Visitors entering the Science Center Plaza tent met hundreds of students from ES 50: “Introduction to Electrical Engineering,” a course that attracts undergraduates from all concentrations with its lively teaching staff and emphasis on creativity. They were joined by students from more than a dozen SEAS courses in engineering sciences, applied mathematics, and computer science who contributed demonstrations, discoveries, posters, and prototypes to the fair.

Some were just fun, like the giant piano keyboard that sprawled across the floor of the tent, or the arcade-style variations on the addictive game “2048,” using light-up colored squares or LEDs instead of numbers.

A group of undergraduates in ES 50 added a bit of extra mayhem with their SMS-based prank hotline, accessible to all. Texting the word “joyride” caused a remote-controlled car to appear out of nowhere, colliding erratically with visitors’ feet as it sped through the aisles. Another text message triggered a tank hidden beneath the exhibit tables to spray a jet of water, or turned lights on and off across the room.

But most projects — hundreds of them — sought a higher purpose, tackling challenges in graphic design, mathematics, education, astronomy, music, and everyday logistics.

Philosophy concentrator Simon Huesken ’14 and chemist Sean Poppen ’16 wanted to create a new kind of tactile input device, beyond mice and tablets, to make painting software easier to use. Click-and-drag scale bars for attributes such as color or brush size can interrupt the actual drawing process, so they created a glove with magnets and sensors embedded in the fingertips. Hold your thumb and forefinger closer together and the students’ back-end software understands you want a narrower brush stroke. Three fingers can blend red, green, and blue pigments into precise tints and shades.

“It makes me really happy that I have created something that you can use, and it works,” said Huesken, who took ES 50 in his final semester at Harvard. After years of more abstract learning, he said, “I really, really wanted to build something, and this class helped me do that.”

Neurobiology concentrator Ben Glauser ’15 participates in Harvard track and field. With two teammates and a classmate in ES 50, he built a set of gates that use lasers to measure running times.

Amy Weiss-Meyer ’15, a history and literature concentrator, had always been interested in how typographical design contributes to aesthetics and readability. She and her ES 50 classmates built a small, remote-controlled robot that wields a pen, drawing a trail behind it as it roams. They designed a new font from scratch and used the robot to explore code-based approaches to leading and kerning.

“I didn’t really know anything about engineering, and I wanted to take this course to learn more about it,” Weiss-Meyer said. “Once I saw what was possible, my thinking progressed.”

Her team is now considering how a robot like theirs might be useful to people with impaired motor skills who have trouble drawing or writing on their own.

A group of graduate students at Harvard Extension School tackled another challenge in graphic design: converting pixel-based bitmap images to curve-based vector graphics that can be enlarged without sacrificing detail. Suraj Khetarpal, Jeremy Watson, Jeffry Pincus, and Dinesh Malav, students in CS 51, “Introduction to Computer Science II,” wrote a program that detects edges within a black-and-white image and then uses them to mathematically define contours.

While CS 50, “Introduction to Computer Science,” provides a whirlwind introduction to programming, Henry Leitner’s CS 51 teaches students to more deliberately design code that is elegant, efficient, safe, consistent, and accessible to other programmers.

“It’s been fun and challenging,” said Christian Liu ’17, who with three other freshmen created a tool that solves symbolic algebra problems — not down to a string of decimal figures, but the way a human would.

Students in AM 207, “Advanced Scientific Computing,” solve complex problems another way, using a set of techniques called stochastic optimization. Anita Mehrotra, a master’s candidate in computational science and engineering, used Bayesian analysis to investigate correlations between K-12 education variables and long-term outcomes such as college attendance and lifetime income. Yuan-Sen Ting and Hope How-Huan Chen, graduate students in the department of astronomy, used machine learning techniques to improve the selection of multiple-choice questions for standardized tests. The system reduces bias against particular social groups while improving the accuracy of the test as a measure of overall knowledge.

Others discovered new ways to predict temperatures across the United States, detect moving objects in space, and optimize taxicab routes.

Creating a tool or product that functions properly is essential, but it’s equally important to create something that people actually want, said Beth Altringer, a lecturer on innovation and design. She teaches ES 22, “Design Survivor: Experiential Lessons in Designing for Desirability,” which is offered jointly by SEAS and the Graduate School of Design.

Altringer assigns her class a new challenge weekly, each intended to throw students out of their comfort zones and prompt them to question their assumptions. At the end of every week, they must present a product concept and defend their design choices. “I ask them, ‘Has anyone in this room ever thought about this before? No?’ And then they’ve got a week.”

The students learn quickly.

“I made a watch with someone, I made a song with someone, I made a commercial with someone, I made my app myself, we made a design for a restaurant experience — pretty much any idea you can think of — in a challenge connected with a product,” said Christopher Cleveland ’14, a senior concentrating in sociology and in mind, brain, and behavior. Besides exposing him to mobile app design, Adobe design software, and prototyping techniques like 3-D printing and laser cutting, he said, the course “helped me think about communication — communicating clearly to get people to follow along with the goals of your product design.”

That kind of confident leadership is essential for graduates in any field, said Habbal, who has overseen the expansion of the design-based curriculum at SEAS and the growth of the undergraduate teaching labs.

“The idea of design thinking can be applied anywhere, and the concept of solving problems is a universal concept,” he said. “An engineer by definition solves problems for humanity, and that’s what we’d love everybody to be thinking about.”

The chance to create something new, something of one’s own, attracts students from across Harvard College and the graduate schools.

“The hands-on stuff is really what everybody craves, and that’s the most fun part,” said Alex Raun ’17, who took ES 50 this semester and plans to declare a concentration in engineering sciences in the fall. “I’m glad that instead of a final exam we have this project to work toward. It’s cool.”

Editor’s note: This is the fourth in an occasional series of stories on the measures that individual Schools at Harvard are using to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) is a rigorous world of applied mathematics, materials science, bioengineering, and other demanding disciplines.

But it is also a world in which nearly every common space includes green laminate signs or motion-control sensors to turn off lighting. The collective message: Be green.

Turn off the lights, wear a sweater, shut the sash on your fume hood. It’s not rocket science. Or, as they say at SEAS: It’s not quantum physics.

But simple steps like these — along with exacting building standards and other technical measures — have helped SEAS to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 11 percent from fiscal 2006 to fiscal 2009. That kind of progress also owes a lot to University-wide measures to save energy, said Edward P. Jackson, SEAS director of physical resources.

That number puts the School on track to meet the University’s ambitious GHG emissions goal of a 30 percent reduction by 2016, inclusive of growth, with 2006 as the baseline year.

SEAS tightened the University-wide standard for temperature set points by adjusting heating and cooling systems to start later and finish earlier. “We did it, and waited for complaints,” said SEAS manager of facilities Donald Claflin. “And there weren’t many.”

Saving energy is everybody’s business, from big energy systems to students who pause to shut off the lights. “It’s a lot of little pieces,” he said. “Everybody’s involved. Everybody’s a player.”

On the technical side, SEAS has installed efficient lighting in its five buildings, and on the two floors it leases at 60 Oxford St. It has also implemented an automated energy management system in the Maxwell Dworkin building, and examined its operating system through the lens of energy savings. By this fall, SEAS will have motion-detection sensors on lights in all of its operation.

“It’s many small steps,” said Fawwaz Habbal, SEAS executive dean. “Little drops of water on a stone will eventually make a mark.”

This kind of effort — assess, innovate, invent — is perfect for engineers, he added. “You give us a problem and we solve it.”

SEAS students, faculty, and staff also are exploring other pathways to sustainability. Some are personal-scale pathways. Custodian Joanne Carson sets aside coffee grounds in a composting bowl in the kitchen at Pierce Hall. People take them home for their gardens, she said.

Other pathways are on a bigger scale. For one, in fiscal 2009, SEAS recovered 60 percent of its recyclable waste, piling up 73 tons for the blue bin.

All SEAS buildings are covered by a green cleaning program that minimizes chemical use. And four LEED projects are under way at SEAS; one more is complete. (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a professional U.S. rating system for sustainable building.)

The SEAS Computing and Information Technology office has already been converted from 2,000 square feet of lounge space to three energy-efficient offices in Maxwell Dworkin.

At SEAS Northwest Labs B1, a LEED project now under construction will bring together researchers in medicine, engineering, biology, and applied sciences.

Renovations are ongoing at the SEAS Vlassak Lab and the Weitz Lab, both in the Gordon McKay Laboratory of Applied Science on Oxford Street. LEED-standard renovations are also taking place in two engineering science laboratories at 58 Oxford St.

“Labs are really challenging,” said Habbal. At SEAS, they are energy-intensive hives of complicated gear, from computers, fume hoods, and imaging systems to quantum-cascade lasers.

In addition, SEAS researchers there are looking into new sources of energy, African water resources, efficient computing, carbon sequestration, and the chemistry of climate change.

Sustainability, said SEAS administrative director Jennifer Casasanto, “is part of our dialogue.”

Sustainability is also about encouraging ideas. That means student involvement.

SEAS is part of an arts-science collaboration that helps students and faculty turn their ideas — many of them about green technology — into practical reality. The Laboratory at Harvard, located in the Northwest Science Building, is run by SEAS faculty member David Edwards, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering, along with SEAS staff member Hugo Van Vuuren.

A couple of ideas have already reached reality. One is the sOccket, a portable energy-making device shaped like a soccer ball. Kick, dribble, or throw it around, and the sOccket — rigged with inductive coil technology — stores energy. Prototypes have been tested in South Africa and Kenya.

Also, SEAS student Henry Xie ’11 developed the Harvard Reuse List, an online supply swap for students and staff.

Traditional classroom work touches on sustainability, as well. The oldest such class — and “a capstone experience for students,” said Habbal — is Engineering Science (ES) 96.

Students take on real-world issues at Harvard, then produce book-length recommendations for action. Past examples include energy use at Pierce Hall, the Blackstone complex, and Harvard athletic facilities and Houses.

SEAS classes in applied mathematics, environmental engineering, and climate studies deal with sustainability too.

It’s an issue that requires cooperation, awareness, collective action, and intensive study. “The bottom line,” said Habbal, “is mindset.”

In business, one well-prepared conversation can change everything.

Rebecca Kantar ’14 knows how that works. During a trip to Silicon Valley with other Harvard students, she sat down with a mentor to get advice on her young start-up, BrightCo.

She left that meeting with a verbal commitment for seed funding.

“I was in shock when I got back to the bus,” she recalls with a laugh.

Serendipity will always play a role in entrepreneurship, but it takes far more than a fortuitous meeting to translate an idea into reality. For Kantar, that one moment was backed by months of network building, ideation, and careful pitch preparation.

Here in Cambridge, an ever-expanding web of support, through teaching and advising, is helping students create new networks, gain hands-on experience, and ultimately make a difference in the world.

“In entrepreneurship, if you learn the process it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll succeed,” explains Fawwaz Habbal, executive dean for education and research at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). “But is it possible for me to help you through education to do extremely well? I think the answer is yes.”

That education starts in the classroom. Through hands-on courses that tackle real, challenging problems — like designing medical devices, using apps to combat gang violence, or enhancing sustainability on campus — students gain a rigorous exposure to the engineering design process.

“What these courses teach is extremely important; it’s how we generate ideas,” says Habbal. “It’s not sitting under a tree and waiting for an apple to fall on your head — that story is just not true. Newton spent 30 years working on that problem before it came to him, and Einstein did not simply come up with his ideas while he was an attorney reading patents.”

Increasingly, too, the engineering community at Harvard is blurring the lines between the classroom and the “real world,” teaching and supporting the design process from idea to implementation. In most high schools (and many universities), what happens in the classroom stays in the classroom. That’s not the case at SEAS, as freshmen soon find out.

Zachary Hamed ’14, for instance, took CS 50, SEAS’s introductory computer science course, in fall 2010 and developed Aid Aide as his final project. The website, reminiscent of tax software, was designed to help prospective college students navigate the federal applications for financial aid.

During the winter, Hamed worked out some kinks in the project through Hack Harvard, a student group that collaborates on software and apps, receiving valuable feedback that helped him prepare for the Harvard College Innovation (I³) Challenge last spring. Aid Aide won at I³, and Hamed received the $10,000 McKinley Family Grant for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Leadership in a Social Enterprise.

Meanwhile, Hack Harvard had connected Hamed with a business mentor, Andrew Rosenthal, a founder of Startup Tribe at Harvard Business School (HBS).

“He’s an email away from a chat over coffee,” says Hamed, who is a computer science concentrator at SEAS. “He’s invaluable for connecting with HBS. He knows exactly who to talk to.”

That relationship proved critical when Hamed discovered, last summer, that another company was developing a financial aid website in the same niche as his own. With Rosenthal’s help, he met with the other company’s venture capitalists, considered moving out to Silicon Valley to join them, and eventually arranged a deal to merge the two projects —a decision which allowed him to return to school at Harvard in the fall.

The bond between Harvard and Silicon Valley is a close one. The region is home to a powerful network of alumni willing to offer mentorship to students and recent graduates who are dreaming big. Taking advantage of that network, SEAS and HBS recently came together to organize the trip to Palo Alto over winter break.

Led by SEAS’s Habbal and HBS’s Tom Eisenmann, in concert with the Harvard Innovation Lab, the January Silicon Valley trip was a whirlwind tour. In just one week, 36 undergraduate and graduate students visited 14 technology companies, five venture capital firms, Stanford University’s design school, and still found time for nine expert presentations and panel discussions, as well as meetings with mentors and alumni.

“Silicon Valley” these days is a misnomer, as the region is no longer dominated by electronics manufacturers. The industry has also shifted away from the purely commercial “dot-com” companies that flourished 10 to 15 years ago. Today, Silicon Valley is synonymous with Web services like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Taskrabbit, and Cloudflare.

“That industry is bringing a lot of talent to Silicon Valley, and a very different type of talent than it was in the early 2000s,” says Habbal. “Our students in general are extremely well-equipped to do a lot of it, both in engineering and on the business side.”

Lauren Dai ’13, for example, grew up with a flair for business. As a kid, she would convince her friends to help set up garage sales at her house, and in her teens she started a tutoring business.

“Those little things add up, and then you figure out you really like doing this,” she says.

An economics concentrator at Harvard, Dai has co-founded the Cabot Entrepreneurship Series, which brings faculty and alumni to Cabot House as occasional speakers. Last year, she also served on the executive board of Harvard Undergraduate Women in Business, raising more than $120,000 as the club’s fundraising chair. She’s now responsible for cultivating mentoring relationships with the group’s alumnae and advisory board.

Like many others, Dai took CS 50 and has found that the trip to Silicon Valley has further solidified her interest in technology entrepreneurship as a career.

“I had thought … that it really takes someone with a good idea — the Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg-type person — and because they have such a good idea, they’re going to drop out of college and start their own company,” she says. “But the majority of the entrepreneurs that I’ve met are not that type of person. It’s just that they’re very driven and passionate about running businesses.”

“I really like the concept of having your own ‘baby’ to grow,” Dai adds, “and it’s not really as much of a risk as people make it out to be.”

Of course, entrepreneurship does carry a certain amount of risk. Does chance favor the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur once said?

Pondering this, Habbal recalls the student conversations he overheard on the bus rides between company visits in Silicon Valley:

“They started to think about their own potential businesses,” he says, “and when somebody suggested an idea, someone else would say, ‘But remember, that happened there, and it didn’t work.’”

For students like Dai and Hamed, Harvard provides an invaluable playground for experimentation and learning from trial and error. Between the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, the I³ Challenge, Hack Harvard, the President’s Challenge, and the Experiment Fund, the resources that support innovation right here in Cambridge are almost endless.

“We’re creating a generation of people who can deal with things beyond the classroom, whether it’s in doing design or trying to put it to work, to engage with the world,” says Habbal. “That’s extremely important

When Kathy Ku ’13 proposed to build a water-filter factory in Uganda for $15,000 last year, her contacts in other African countries advised her to double her budget.

Starting from scratch on a plot of land donated by Kumi University, in a country where 10 million people — a third of the population — lack access to clean water, Ku forged ahead. She and a team of Harvard College classmates rented a truck, negotiated an individual price for each building material (cement, wire mesh, and so on), and finished with $3,000 to spare.

“We didn’t know better, and we didn’t realize how difficult it would be,” Ku recalls. “But now we can construct a factory, apparently.”

When the factory needed a hydraulic press to increase its output of clay water filters, Ku asked around.

“They said, ‘There’s no way,’” she remembers. “Everyone said that in Uganda you couldn’t make them: You had to go to Kenya.”

Undeterred, and with help from the undergraduate teaching labs at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Ku bought a cheap hydraulic log splitter, dismantled it at her parents’ house in Illinois, and carried the components to Uganda in her suitcase. The scheme gave her a thorough introduction to Ugandan customs regulations — and solved the problem.

Driven by idealism yet grounded in solid engineering principles and cultural awareness, the project is anything but naïve. If all goes to plan, by next August Ku and her classmates will have created a fully functional and self-sustaining water-filter factory, employing 14 people and supplying clean water to households across Uganda at half the cost of imported filters.

Equally comfortable taking apart a diesel engine or quoting Adam Smith, Ku is the very picture of a Harvard engineer: fluent in hard science, intellectually well-rounded, and passionate.

Inspired by her early involvement with Harvard College Engineers Without Borders and her experience at a secondary school for Ugandan mothers in the summer of 2010, Ku enrolled in Harvard courses ranging from public health to technological innovation. As her interest in addressing the Ugandan water crisis grew, she recruited other students to help.

“I must have talked about it so much during dinner that somebody said, ‘Kathy, why don’t you just go for it?’ And before I knew it, I had a group of students who were interested in doing what I wanted to do.”

Suvai Gunasekaran ’13 (biomedical engineering), John Kye ’14 (economics), and more than a dozen other students joined the project, which they named “Sustainable Point-Of-Use Treatment and Storage (SPOUTS) of Water.” SPOUTS, now a registered nonprofit, has received support from across the University: the Committee on African Studies, Nectar and TECH at SEAS, and the Harvard President’s Challenge all contributed.

And Ku, who studied molecular and cellular biology as an undergraduate, is now a master’s student in engineering sciences at SEAS.

“No matter where you’re coming from, if you want to understand technology, if you want to make a positive impact in a technology-driven world, you belong in a SEAS classroom,” says SEAS Dean Cherry A. Murray. “This is ‘engineering for everyone.’”

Attracted by engaging courses and the real-world relevance of applied research, students are flocking to SEAS classrooms. Enrollment in SEAS courses and the number of SEAS concentrators have more than doubled since the School was established in 2007, filling lecture halls and laboratories to capacity — and posing new challenges for faculty and staff.

Enabling continued growth at SEAS is one of six top priorities of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ $2.5-billion Campaign for Arts and Sciences. SEAS aims to raise $450 million to increase the size of its world-class faculty; create modern instructional spaces for teaching, hands-on design, and laboratory research; invest in “innovation funds” for cutting-edge, high-impact research; and support talented students through graduate fellowships.

“Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is reimagining engineering education and research for the 21st century,” says FAS Dean Michael D. Smith, the John H. Finley, Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “What makes SEAS truly special for undergraduates is that, at Harvard, students receive world-class instruction in engineering as part of a world-class liberal arts education.”

SEAS is a place where one student can improve the outcome of cancer chemotherapy. Another, tinkering in the small hours of the morning, can help a tiny robotic insect take flight. A third can use mathematics and physics to understand human development. And insights from all three, cross-pollinating in a hallway conversation, could make extraordinary contributions to the future of science.

“It is not unusual for the ideas developed in courses and labs to take on a life of their own after the end of the semester,” says Fawwaz Habbal, executive dean for education and research at SEAS. “We are fortunate to have outstanding students, and we are very pleased to work with them and mentor them in a process that adds value. Given the right inspiration, the right mentorship, and access to resources, they have what it takes to change the world.”

For example, while taking an engineering sciences course called “Idea Translation” a few years ago, Jessica Lin ’09, Jessica O. Matthews ’10, Julia Silverman ’10, and Hemali Thakkar ’11 imagined a soccer ball that could generate enough energy during play to charge a cellphone or power a light in parts of the world where electricity is unreliable. They kept working on the project after graduation, and by July of this year, President Obama was kicking around a functional Soccket ball during a visit to Tanzania. “I don’t want to get too technical,” the president said, “but I thought it was pretty cool.”

Indeed, SEAS faculty, students, and alumni are improving living conditions around the world. Whether designing medical devices in India, improving a water supply in the Dominican Republic, searching for land mines in Cambodia, recycling electronic waste in Ghana, examining carbon emissions in China, measuring pollution over the Amazon, or tracing the flow of mercury in the Arctic, the impact of their efforts has been profound.

For the students working in Uganda, making a difference means understanding how to build change from within a community. Chlorine tablets could be an effective way to sanitize water, but in Uganda no one would like the taste; instead, the Harvard project’s clay filters complement existing practices, where water is stored in terracotta pots to cool.

SPOUTS also hopes to encourage participation by selling filters to individual households. “It allows people to take ownership and almost view the filters as a social status,” Ku explains. “Once that mind-set gets rolling, it becomes a commodity that becomes worth investing in.”

The SPOUTS model is designed to be sustainable long after the students have moved on. Partnering with nongovernmental organizations as distributors, Ku and her classmates will require that income from filter sales be used to create jobs and finance local projects.

“Solving complex global challenges requires holistic and long-range thinking. Our students gain that perspective through rigorous engineering courses, exposure to ideas from across the liberal arts, and hands-on practical experience,” says Murray. “The SPOUTS of Water project is tackling waterborne illness with real success.”

Eventually, when the filter factory no longer needs her, Ku hopes to attend medical school and then to move to rural Uganda as a physician. “I’m not a hardcore engineer, I’m not a hardcore biologist,” she says, “but I think it has allowed me to be a better leader.”

Music blared, LEDs blinked, and jaws dropped Tuesday at the SEAS Design and Project Fair, a celebration of creative problem-solving by students at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

The festival carries ideas from one scientific field to another and allows them to cross-pollinate. It also provides an incentive for harried students in the last few weeks of the semester to generate a polished and presentable final product. But most importantly, said Fawwaz Habbal, executive dean for education and research, the fair encourages “anyone, whether it’s for homework or their own self-expression, to go ahead and create something.”

Visitors entering the Science Center Plaza tent met hundreds of students from ES 50: “Introduction to Electrical Engineering,” a course that attracts undergraduates from all concentrations with its lively teaching staff and emphasis on creativity. They were joined by students from more than a dozen SEAS courses in engineering sciences, applied mathematics, and computer science who contributed demonstrations, discoveries, posters, and prototypes to the fair.

Some were just fun, like the giant piano keyboard that sprawled across the floor of the tent, or the arcade-style variations on the addictive game “2048,” using light-up colored squares or LEDs instead of numbers.

A group of undergraduates in ES 50 added a bit of extra mayhem with their SMS-based prank hotline, accessible to all. Texting the word “joyride” caused a remote-controlled car to appear out of nowhere, colliding erratically with visitors’ feet as it sped through the aisles. Another text message triggered a tank hidden beneath the exhibit tables to spray a jet of water, or turned lights on and off across the room.

But most projects — hundreds of them — sought a higher purpose, tackling challenges in graphic design, mathematics, education, astronomy, music, and everyday logistics.

Philosophy concentrator Simon Huesken ’14 and chemist Sean Poppen ’16 wanted to create a new kind of tactile input device, beyond mice and tablets, to make painting software easier to use. Click-and-drag scale bars for attributes such as color or brush size can interrupt the actual drawing process, so they created a glove with magnets and sensors embedded in the fingertips. Hold your thumb and forefinger closer together and the students’ back-end software understands you want a narrower brush stroke. Three fingers can blend red, green, and blue pigments into precise tints and shades.

“It makes me really happy that I have created something that you can use, and it works,” said Huesken, who took ES 50 in his final semester at Harvard. After years of more abstract learning, he said, “I really, really wanted to build something, and this class helped me do that.”

Neurobiology concentrator Ben Glauser ’15 participates in Harvard track and field. With two teammates and a classmate in ES 50, he built a set of gates that use lasers to measure running times.

Amy Weiss-Meyer ’15, a history and literature concentrator, had always been interested in how typographical design contributes to aesthetics and readability. She and her ES 50 classmates built a small, remote-controlled robot that wields a pen, drawing a trail behind it as it roams. They designed a new font from scratch and used the robot to explore code-based approaches to leading and kerning.

“I didn’t really know anything about engineering, and I wanted to take this course to learn more about it,” Weiss-Meyer said. “Once I saw what was possible, my thinking progressed.”

Her team is now considering how a robot like theirs might be useful to people with impaired motor skills who have trouble drawing or writing on their own.

A group of graduate students at Harvard Extension School tackled another challenge in graphic design: converting pixel-based bitmap images to curve-based vector graphics that can be enlarged without sacrificing detail. Suraj Khetarpal, Jeremy Watson, Jeffry Pincus, and Dinesh Malav, students in CS 51, “Introduction to Computer Science II,” wrote a program that detects edges within a black-and-white image and then uses them to mathematically define contours.

While CS 50, “Introduction to Computer Science,” provides a whirlwind introduction to programming, Henry Leitner’s CS 51 teaches students to more deliberately design code that is elegant, efficient, safe, consistent, and accessible to other programmers.

“It’s been fun and challenging,” said Christian Liu ’17, who with three other freshmen created a tool that solves symbolic algebra problems — not down to a string of decimal figures, but the way a human would.

Students in AM 207, “Advanced Scientific Computing,” solve complex problems another way, using a set of techniques called stochastic optimization. Anita Mehrotra, a master’s candidate in computational science and engineering, used Bayesian analysis to investigate correlations between K-12 education variables and long-term outcomes such as college attendance and lifetime income. Yuan-Sen Ting and Hope How-Huan Chen, graduate students in the department of astronomy, used machine learning techniques to improve the selection of multiple-choice questions for standardized tests. The system reduces bias against particular social groups while improving the accuracy of the test as a measure of overall knowledge.

Others discovered new ways to predict temperatures across the United States, detect moving objects in space, and optimize taxicab routes.

Creating a tool or product that functions properly is essential, but it’s equally important to create something that people actually want, said Beth Altringer, a lecturer on innovation and design. She teaches ES 22, “Design Survivor: Experiential Lessons in Designing for Desirability,” which is offered jointly by SEAS and the Graduate School of Design.

Altringer assigns her class a new challenge weekly, each intended to throw students out of their comfort zones and prompt them to question their assumptions. At the end of every week, they must present a product concept and defend their design choices. “I ask them, ‘Has anyone in this room ever thought about this before? No?’ And then they’ve got a week.”

The students learn quickly.

“I made a watch with someone, I made a song with someone, I made a commercial with someone, I made my app myself, we made a design for a restaurant experience — pretty much any idea you can think of — in a challenge connected with a product,” said Christopher Cleveland ’14, a senior concentrating in sociology and in mind, brain, and behavior. Besides exposing him to mobile app design, Adobe design software, and prototyping techniques like 3-D printing and laser cutting, he said, the course “helped me think about communication — communicating clearly to get people to follow along with the goals of your product design.”

That kind of confident leadership is essential for graduates in any field, said Habbal, who has overseen the expansion of the design-based curriculum at SEAS and the growth of the undergraduate teaching labs.

“The idea of design thinking can be applied anywhere, and the concept of solving problems is a universal concept,” he said. “An engineer by definition solves problems for humanity, and that’s what we’d love everybody to be thinking about.”

The chance to create something new, something of one’s own, attracts students from across Harvard College and the graduate schools.

“The hands-on stuff is really what everybody craves, and that’s the most fun part,” said Alex Raun ’17, who took ES 50 this semester and plans to declare a concentration in engineering sciences in the fall. “I’m glad that instead of a final exam we have this project to work toward. It’s cool.”

All that work by helicopter parents to whip their children into Ivy League shape is a fool’s errand that perpetuates a flawed educational caste system where high-achieving “zombie” students train diligently for elite careers, but learn little of value about life or themselves.

That’s author William Deresiewicz’s acidic assessment of top-tier universities, their students, and the admissions process. His contention has ignited widespread debate since an excerpt from his new book, “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life,” appeared in The New Republic in July. It is reportedly the most widely read piece in the magazine’s 100-year history.

A graduate of Columbia University who taught English at Yale, Deresiewicz based his book on ideas he first espoused in 2008. It has garnered praise from observers like David Brooks, the New York Times’ Op-Ed columnist, for raising important questions about the role that elite colleges and universities should play in shaping young lives, and the still-lagging effort to assemble an intellectually and socioeconomically diverse student body.

But the book also has drawn criticism from others who say it is sometimes gratuitously caustic and simplistic, painting everyone with a broad brush. Among the critics is Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, whose blistering rebuttal of Deresiewicz’ work also ran in The New Republic earlier this month.

“The book isn’t called, ‘Don’t Send Your Kids to the Ivy League’ or ‘Everything Is the Fault of the Ivy League,’ ” Deresiewicz said in an interview earlier this month from his home in Oregon, in advance of an appearance at Harvard Monday night. “Fundamentally, this is about the whole system that gets kids into the colleges, and even what happens to them afterward.”

He criticized an admissions process that he said overvalues credentials — standardized test scores, grade-point averages, and resume-padding extracurriculars — and undervalues smart but creative or offbeat students who haven’t mastered the art of hoop jumping and can’t afford to get expert help burnishing their resumes.

“What that process produces, and what I think the colleges don’t do nearly enough to disrupt, are the kinds of people whom I call ‘excellent sheep,’” he said. “They’re great students [who] become great at learning how to work the system; they become great at learning how to do the minimum they need to do in order to maintain their G.P.A. and the whole resume array.”

Deresiewicz said many students over the years have admitted, fairly cynically, that they know “education is a code to be cracked.” They defend their laundry lists of activities as evidence of their intellectual passion, a claim Deresiewicz views with a jaundiced eye.

“OK, maybe you chose the 12 [activities] you’re quote-unquote interested in, but that’s not the same as passion,” he said. “To me, a passion is something that seizes you so deeply that you don’t care about doing the other 11 things.

“As critical as I am of the students, they’re not really my targets. My targets are the people who make them who they are. It’s the schools that create the criteria, not the admissions officers per se, and it’s the crazy, upper-middle-class parents who insist on inflicting this on their children because they would fall into a bottomless abyss of disgrace if their kid didn’t get into Harvard.”

Deresiewicz lobbies for elite schools to return to emphasizing a thoughtful liberal-arts education, one that encourages students to find their passion, not their profession.

He also takes issue with the persistent scarcity of students from poor and blue-collar backgrounds at elite schools. While it’s laudable that Harvard provides at least 60 percent of undergraduates with some form of financial aid, he said, that still means 40 percent — too many, in his view — have enough money that they don’t need help.

“Listen, I think there are some very well-meaning people at Harvard and other schools, and they genuinely want to do something about this, and they’re genuinely trying, but this is the other reason why I say what we really need is free public higher education.”

Now on a book tour that includes several Ivy League schools, Deresiewicz came to Harvard Monday night to square off with students and faculty for a question-and-answer session convened by Homi K. Bhabha, director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. “I’m going to those schools because I think they’re the ones that need to hear what I’m saying,” he explained of his visit.

Before a packed, tense Paine Hall, panelists including Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana; Diana Sorensen, the James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature and dean of arts and humanities at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS); Fawwaz Habbal, executive dean for education and research at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), took aim at Deresiewicz’s depiction of college students as caricatures and disputed his view that universities must help students “build a soul,” not just train the next generation of leaders.

“What gives me pause, and what gives other people pause, is when you go on to fault us for failing to ensure that all of our students develop souls, and that they do so on a four-year schedule” that might be better called ‘No Soul Left Behind,’ ” said English Professor Amanda Claybaugh. “What happens when you try to institutionalize what should be a fundamentally individual process? And I wonder if you worry about — if we make it clear to our students that what we’re trying to do is help them build souls — does soul-building become yet another box to check for them?”

Bhabha told Deresiewicz that while he welcomed his frankness and support for the importance of the humanities, he found Deresiewicz’s view that students who go on to become bankers and lawyers are shallow careerists surprisingly “stereotypical” and amounted to little more than “finger-pointing and name-calling.”

“Why do you assume that bankers aren’t interested in soul-making?” asked Bhabha.

Khurana suggested that in this era of declining economic prospects, Harvard students and their parents reasonably worry about their future careers and that the University plays only one part in driving students’ choices and ambitions.

Deresiewicz said that careerism at Harvard is a problem that long predates the current recession. “Nothing that I’m describing started in 2008. I think the place where that argument is least valid is here,” he said. “Because fairly or unfairly … if you get out of here with a degree,” you’re quite likely to enjoy, at a minimum, a comfortable, middle-class life, he added.

“You may not be wealthy, but by any reasonable standard, the Harvard name is going to open any doors you want it to open.”

The relief in Pinalito is palpable. The water is clean again.

For the past 2½ years, students in the Harvard University chapter of Engineers Without Borders have been rehabilitating and improving a potable water system in the rural town in the Dominican Republic. After the most recent visit, the students returned to campus in late August having successfully worked with the community to upgrade the water quality and distribution system.

“The residents now have a clean source of water, something they haven’t had for five or more years,” said the group’s adviser, Christopher Lombardo, assistant director for undergraduate studies in engineering sciences at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). “The well that was built by a government contractor had failed; it had been improperly installed and was clogged with clay. The new, productive, and clean water well can produce 27 gallons a minute.”

When the Harvard team first arrived, the community was skeptical. By working with translators and speaking with people who lived there, the students built the trust needed to move the project forward in the most beneficial way for the town.

“From the beginning, we designed a system with the community,” said Leah Gaffney ’15, the Harvard chapter president, who had visited on two of the five earlier excursions.

“We walked around with community members and talked about water sources and options. We did an extensive analysis of options: Should we dig a new well or pipe water from the existing spring? We acted as consultants to determine the best way to go forward,” said Gaffney, who studies biomedical engineering at SEAS.

Indeed, community-driven development programs comprise the heart of the mission of Engineers Without Borders-USA, a humanitarian organization working worldwide to design and build sustainable engineering projects in full partnership with host communities. SEAS, for its part, encourages students to take advantage of such opportunities abroad.

“We want our students to be aware that although we’re teaching them engineering in Cambridge, there are many other perspectives they’ll need to consider when they go further afield — and they won’t always have access to a state-of-the-art lab,” said Fawwaz Habbal, executive dean for education and research at SEAS. “The role of an engineer is to help solve problems, to improve life. But it’s only by listening and engaging with the stakeholders that a sustainable solution can take root.”

After each field research visit, the student team returned to Harvard and consulted with engineering faculty and staff in the SEAS Teaching Labs, as well as other professionals in the Engineers Without Borders network. A technical advisory committee reviewed all of the visitors’ work.

“We also worked on education,” said Gaffney, explaining that she and her fellow students visited local schools and talked with children about water purification and the importance of good sanitation.

“I’m most proud of the relationships we have fostered in the community, and the mutual pride in the project,” she said.

Located in a mountainous region in central Dominican Republic, Pinalito’s modest houses are made of tin, wood, and concrete. The homes perch on a hillside that slopes down to a river.

The students knew going in that poor water quality is linked to gastrointestinal illness and larger public health concerns.

“A critical part of the project was to pipe water into people’s homes. Before that, they were taking buckets down to the river and carrying water back up,” said Tunde Demuren ’15, a mechanical engineering concentrator and project leader who made four trips to the area.

The team’s largest design improvement involved changing the site of the well.

“It made sense to drill a well on the opposite side of the river where there are the highest density of houses,” said Lombardo.

After consulting with the community, it was agreed that the well and pipes would be located on property owned by a community leader, Luis Ciprian, primarily because he had paperwork to show ownership of the land.

William Jameson ’16, an electrical engineering concentrator and project leader, had designed wiring for the electrical pump systems on a previous visit. He returned in August to add additional piping to improve the water pressure and reliability of the system, and to construct more robust metal-and-concrete tap stands.

Students worked for 12 hours a day, from dawn until dusk, and were integrated into the life of the community.

“We had lunch in the community every day. We bought groceries, and Luis’ wife, Daisy, would make chicken, rice, beans, and avocado,” said Jameson.

“It was a really great experience, more personable and enjoyable than I thought it would be,” said Sylvia Percovich ’15, who visited for the first time in August as one of the team’s translators. “I saw the community embrace the people as much as the project. I felt like I was coming home to a family that my friends were part of.

“I thought I was only going to translate, but was completely immersed in the project. It was a crash course, a very hands-on experience. I didn’t know how to fix a pipe, but I could pass tools to people or go to the grocery store,” Percovich said.

The most recent quality test determined the water was clean, and the well was deemed to satisfy community demands. To ensure that the system will continue to operate successfully, the community has voted to pay a small monthly fee to an elected treasurer to maintain the project.

At the final community meeting, Manuel Ramos ’15, a Dominican national, announced the project’s success in Spanish: “La agua es igual que el botellón.” (“The water is just like bottled water.”) The residents applauded. They threw a party for the team and asked about future community infrastructure projects.

“Engineers Without Borders shows there are people out there trying to make the world a slightly better place,” said Percovich.