Today we got the opportunity to visit TU Delft! The Technical University of Delft is a technical college located around 20 minutes outside of Rotterdam. The campus was gorgeous and big. Definitely, going during a weekday gave us a good understanding of what college life is really like compared to Pitt.

Firstly, we began our day by getting on the train from Rotterdam Central and heading over to the Delft campus to start our eventful day as a visitor. We first started by heading over to the Green Village where we got a tour of specific projects and things going on. The Green Village is an area on campus that helps in kicking off different engineering projects ane experiments without the difficulty of aquiring a permit. Our tour guide showed us some of the projects going on right now like, for example, comparing how to place and paint buildings and houses to help with insulation and heating. In this case, they decided to paint the walls outside black to atract more heat but it diesnt radiate that much heat compared to white, making the people standing outside the building more comfortable, but also painted the top of the house white in order for the heat waves to radiate back towarda the atmostphere. There were many other projects like testing to see if the energy aquired from solar power, converted to hydrogen, converted to usable energy to be used in buildings and houses. This project made them find out that in the past, they were able to use 8 hours of sun energy for 8 days of energy. This, now a days would generate even more electricity. They also have hydrogen tanks to save the energy and eventually use it during the winter when there is less sunlight. As one can see, most of these projects have to do a lot with improving sustainability or maintainability in order to better our environment.

Moreover, we later headed over to the Climate Fresk Workshop. This workshop focused on connecting and comparing things we do with climate change and seeking answers and options that we can take in order to better understand and take action to slow down and eventually stop climate change. We were given different cards, containing subjects and actions that have to do a lot with climate change, for example, the emission of greenhouse gases, human activity, marine and terrain biodiversity, amond many others. Our goal was to be able to connect these cards into a cause and effect relationship. This activity was definitely hard but also extremely inviting and helped me much better understand the consequences of our own actions. Something that I somewhat knew but still surprised me was that the first card was human activity whoch makes sense since we are the reason all of this is happening but after everything connecting to the environment, it all comes back to humans. By humans I mean, inequality, human health, etc.

Afterwards, we discussed different options and posibilities we could take in order to slow this down as citizens, professions and the government. A lot of people proposed many different options which we differentiated into short/long term, easy/difficult and achievable or not.

Overall, this day was really enlightening in many ways making me really think and reflect on everyday decisions and how much they affect the environment and ourselves.