2004 College Interns
Pictured left to right at Hopi Tribe petroglyph: Benjamin Mar, Jennifer Coots, Colin Ben, Deborah Tewa, and Sandra Begay-Campbell.
"This internship has been a great experience that has allowed me to share my perspective as well as learn from other perspectives. My work with other Native People in the engineering field has been an invaluable experience for me since I have not had this opportunity before the internship. This experience has helped me to see that a problem has many facets that cannot be answered entirely with technical answers, but must be complemented by societal, financial, and other considerations as well. By visiting current Native American renewable energy installations, I was able to see the implementation of an electrical engineering design with real world applications — a piece which can be overlooked by engineers when developing the latest technology." — Benjamin Mar, 2004.
The following intern papers are available as Adobe Acrobat PDFs. Download Adobe Reader.
Benjamin Mar (Cherokee) — BS Electrical Engineering, Worchester Polytechnic Institute. For more, see his paper, Navajo Tribal Utility Authority: Photovoltaic Hybrid Operation and Maintenance Process for a Sustainable Program (PDF 546 KB).
Jennifer Coots (Navajo) — MBA Finance, University of New Mexico. For more, see her paper, A Decade of Changes to an Alternative Power Source for a Rural Utility (PDF 312 KB).
Colin Ben (Navajo) — MA American Indian Studies, University of Arizona. For more, see his paper, Researching Renewable Energy Systems Available to Indian Country (PDF 566 KB).
Deborah Tewa (Hopi) — BS Indigenous Studies, Northern Arizona University. Her research focused on DOE's reliability database for off-grid PV systems.