By Andrew Bartsch
When you hear the word energy, your mind probably jumps to science, electricity and the concept of something invisible that makes things work. When you hear the word residential, you most likely think about your home and the places where people live. These two words might seem completely unrelated, but they are actually interconnected when it comes to paying your bills and how you live at home.
As a member of the Residential Energy Team at the Hanley Sustainability Institute, I have helped host an Energy Assessment Bootcamp for the past two years. This is a two-day event for students to learn about comprehensive energy topics, including experiences like a panel of local professionals and experts in the field, and an in-person audit of a campus house. While this event provides great interaction and learning for students, it can be intimidating to attend a multi-day event about something you may know very little or even nothing about.
To address this, our team has condensed the two-day event into a two-hour session called Energy Bootcamp Lite. As the name suggests, Bootcamp Lite takes all of the interesting and important topics from the full bootcamp and presents them in a simpler, more digestible way.
By condensing the material into Bootcamp Lite, our goal was to attract more people who still want to learn about energy but may have been dissuaded by the time commitment or complexity of content offered at the full bootcamp. The hope is that attendees will gain a new appreciation and interest in residential energy topics, inspiring them to attend the full bootcamp the following semester. We also hope to offer more of these shorter events, allowing us to reach a wider audience. Our goal is to make energy education accessible and show fellow students that not only can it be easy to learn, but it will also impact their daily lives when they pay their energy bills.
An example of how the content is adjusted for the Bootcamp Lite is our discussion of the energy grid. At the full bootcamp, we spend ample time going over each stage of the grid, how grids work, utilities and energy markets, electric aggregation and energy justice. In contrast, Bootcamp Lite focuses on generally defining what each stage of the grid is and what the different components are. As I mentioned previously, a student who attends the Bootcamp Lite would then be able to use this knowledge as a foundation for attending the full bootcamp.
In the process of condensing the bootcamp, a challenge our team has faced is communicating these complex energy topics in easily digestible ways. Part of the difficulty stems from having to learn the content ourselves, as a lot of these topics are new to us as well. This adds a learning curve to our team, and we have had to be sure to know the information well enough to teach it to others in a clear and concise way.
While this can be challenging at times, it has brought great learning opportunities for us to explore topics and learn about things we wouldn’t have otherwise. In fact, coming in without a baseline understanding has been helpful in better understanding the perspective of the audience that we are trying to reach.
Additionally, creating presentations and content for Bootcamp Lite has taught me a lot about effective communication. Since many of the topics we cover at Bootcamp Lite involve science-related concepts, it can be easy to resort to making long, wordy presentation slides. However, the same wordy slide can be displayed just as effectively with a single image that we explain more organically, providing a clearer explanation than a long list of words would.
Over the course of my time on the Residential Energy team, I have always been motivated to educate other students on various complex energy topics in a more straightforward way. As a civil engineering major who graduates in December, being able to communicate complex topics in easy-to-understand ways will be extremely important as I enter the workforce. The work that I have done for Bootcamp Lite has prepared me for similar tasks in my future career as a civil engineering professional.
Through my professional work experiences, I have seen how important it is to have a basic understanding of energy, its impact on the environment, and its influence on your utility bills.
The Energy Bootcamp Lite has been a great experience to fulfill that on a targeted, intentional level. Although I won’t get to see the full extent that the Energy Bootcamp Lite will take, I am excited to know that it will continue to serve students and our team members in the future.