Harvard, UTEC and Deutsche Bank join forces in undergraduate research contest

Seeking to foster vocations in science and engineering from undergraduate degree university programs and promote a joint work project that enables them to discover real world and innovative solutions to real world problems, Universidad de Ingeniería & Tecnología (UTEC), Harvard University and Deutsche Bank join forces to introduce the Deutsche Bank Challenge, a contest of challenges in which students from both academic institutions will participate and compete for a fund in the amount of US$ 20,000 granted by the German bank, to be used to implement their concept. The challenges raised by the Deutsche Bank Challenge seek to achieve a social, sustainable, and positive impact and to demonstrate that despite the fact that there are such great distances between countries like Peru and the United States, these can be shortened thanks to active international cooperation between universities. The participating teams in this contest must be made up of two student from UTEC in Peru and two from the SEAS (Harvard School of Engineering and Science) in the USA. The students will also work in cooperation with professors from both academic institutions to provide a solution to one of the challenges presented."At both UTEC and the SEAS, we require students to produce solutions to real world problems starting in their undergraduate school academic programs. Our objective in this contest is to promote our learning method which is based on solving problems which have a global impact.  This association will allow students to propose solutions to problems which regrettably cause the losses of human lives and resources in Peru and throughout the world. This contest is quite unusual and we believe that we are taking a big step forward because in this program Deutsche Bank will reward the best innovative combination on the merits of its proposal, its resource management and potential for implementation.  While many engineers start learning to develop these abilities when they begin to move up in a company, at UTEC we educate our students to begin doing this starting on day one" said Juan Carlos Rodríguez, a UTEC professor."Education and creativity are important sources of growth and progress” said Eduardo Sánchez-Carrión, General Manager of Deutsche Bank Peru. "We are proud to contribute to innovative initiatives like the Deutsche Bank Challenge, with objectives that include finding solutions for the basic needs of the poorest communities in order to o facilitate their access to a better quality of life".Proposals must take into account the viability, implementation, development time and the concept’s impact on communities and beneficiaries.  Teams may submit their proposals until March 22nd and the winning proposal will be announced on April 30th.