Jenna Carter, a senior in mechanical engineering, was influential in helping Purdue's chapter of Engineers Without Borders move forward on a domestic project in Louisiana.  

William Oakes needed a pep talk. 

During spring break 2023, Oakes was in Louisiana, wondering if his Purdue University team was doing the right thing, wondering if they’d be able to get all the right people to help a community that so desperately needed it, wondering if he and a group of students should even be in in the Gulf Coast telling the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe they could help. 

Hurricane Ida had destroyed an estimated 60% of the structures in Terrebonne Parish, one of the southernmost counties in Louisiana, in late 2021, and the rebuilding process had been long and difficult. The community needed a hurricane resiliency center as a recovery base, and that structure also could be used as a community center. 

“The problem was that there was not a model for students to drive a domestic EWB-USA project on this scale,” said Oakes, who was then-director of EPICS, which had an Engineers Without Borders-USA chapter.  

Still, Oakes connected Purdue to the project, and it proved every bit as challenging as he expected. 

There he was in Louisiana in 2023, driving to a hardware store because the student team had miscalculated its needs for an adjacent project to the community center, when Oakes vocalized his discouragement and concerns to the only other person in the car: mechanical engineering student Jenna Carter.  

Without realizing it, Carter provided exactly what Oakes needed. She tends to do that.

“I would say that I have a lot of naïve confidence being so young,” Carter said. “He was like, ‘I’m worried about this.’ I was like, ‘Well, we’ve made it this far. There are people out there, EWB is a whole organization of 10,000 volunteers, people want to do this work. We just have to keep going. We just have to keep trying, and if we keep trying and keep trying, it will work.’” 

Persistence — Carter’s pursuit of it included — has been a picture of the project.  

To starting from scratch in EWB after the project moved from another EPICS team, to re-iterating on initial designs for the space, to assembling a team of professional engineers and architects, to compiling all the documentation and data needed to submit a proposal for a $17 million grant to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in November 2024.  

Carter and William Oakes (center, yellow shirt) have made multiple trips to Louisiana to work with the tribe on the EWB project.  

Carter walked step by step through the early machinations, knowing it was the way it had to be.  

People needed help.  

And Carter’s heart to serve was the ideal match for the work.  

“I’m not just here to sit around, twiddle my thumbs and do my own thing,” Carter said. “I have this time, and I can dedicate it to whatever I want. Why not go help some people along the way? To me, I feel like it’s more of a ‘why not?’ thing.” 

Carter’s work in EWB is a large reason she was selected as one of seven Purdue Engineering Fellows in September — though a 4.0 GPA, excellence in leadership and GEARE program experience didn’t hurt. Oakes nominated Carter for the honor, which comes with $25,000 from benefactors Robert H. Buckman (BSChE ’59) and wife Joyce A. Mollerup.  

“Jenna is not a typical student, not even a typical extraordinary student. I would never expect a student to be so tenacious, creative and professional at such a high level in very diverse settings,” Oakes wrote in his nomination letter. “It is extraordinary for someone as gifted as she to have confidence and humility as well as a hunger to learn.”  

Getting involved 

After graduating from Carmel High School in Indiana, Carter enrolled at Purdue because she liked the culture fit of the College of Engineering’s excellent-but-not-arrogant vibe. That “Hoosier hospitality” was important, knowing the environment would be welcoming and classmates within mechanical engineering would rally to support each other, not compete against each other.   

In her first semester on West Lafayette’s campus, Carter hit up the “B-Involved Fair” to explore student organizations and clubs on campus. With a Spanish minor, she found EWB intriguing because it was connected to a project in Bolivia at the time. As she was being onboarded to EWB, though, that project was canceled. In the spring, the group adopted a project in Rwanda, and Carter worked on the water team. At the end of the academic year, one of the chapter’s older members told the group there was potential to add a domestic project in Louisiana and to email if there was interest in being involved. 

Carter thought about it over the summer and, though she didn’t know the scope of the project, she shot off an email. She was in. 

As a sophomore, Carter learned about the genesis of the Louisiana project: Oakes had a friend, Michael Burns, who founded the Community and College Partners Program (C2P2). Burns and Oakes had connected about a project in Alaska that was under the EPICS Environmental Justice, Access, and Education (EJAE) team’s umbrella.  

Then Ida hit. 

The storm destroyed homes, left the community without power, interrupted water supply and eliminated vital community gathering spaces in the Terrebonne Parish.  

Elder chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar and Carter sit near a floating garden that was created for the community, connected to a senior design project through EWB.  

“I had never seen so much destruction,” a resident told a local TV station.

Burns made Oakes aware of the need. The Alaska project got switched to another university, and Purdue absorbed the Louisiana project. The EJAE group, then a five-person team that was primarily first-year students, came up with a basic design and a rough cost estimate for a community center. But in those two semesters, Oakes realized that wasn’t going to be enough for a substantial grant application for a center that would withstand flooding and hurricanes, complete with sustainable energy, water and food systems in case of emergency.  

“Professor Oakes is amazing in terms of managing partnerships and understanding how to honor and value his partners, and he realized we need to walk with them through the entire process, through a more formal design phase, through the entire grant application,” Carter said.  

The EJAE team didn’t have enough resources to support that kind of project, whereas Purdue’s EWB chapter had about 55 students, many of whom were older, at the time. 

Oakes pitched the idea of Purdue’s EWB team taking over the project to EWB-USA headquarters, and HQ agreed to look at a pilot model that integrated students with its staff and volunteer professionals — if Purdue could put the professional network together. 

That’s where Carter came in.  

Purdue’s EWB-USA team started by creating designs with the goal of completing 30% of that phase and then handling it off to a professional design firm. But they needed to have a firm and engineers to hand off to.  

Oakes had made Carter aware of a domestic partnership between EWB and the Community Engineering Corps (CECorps), a multidisciplinary volunteer network that provides pro-bono engineering and consulting services with communities throughout the U.S. to address infrastructure issues and inequities. To connect with that group on this project, though, EWB would need a “responsible engineering in charge” (REIC). Because there was a possibility that the REIC would have to formally sign off on all of the team’s engineering drawings, the REIC had to be licensed in Louisiana. CECorps advised Carter that the team would need more than one engineer. 

In the spring of Carter’s sophomore year, she started logging hours. She searched the EWB website “Volunteer Village,” and started cold emailing. She reached out to the EWB chapter in New Orleans, and they provided a list of possible fits, and Carter did more emailing and more cold calls.

Through the latter, she found Andy Thiess, an engineer who is program manager for the expansion of the port of New Orleans and who had previously worked with the EWB chapter at Rice University. He was in.  

Around the same time, CECorps passed along contact information about Building Humanity, an architecture non-profit based in California. After CEO and president Erin Colshan and project manager Michael Morrell met with EWB to discuss the Louisiana project, they were in.  

“In the course of a month, it was really that June, everything sort of came together,” Carter said. “We had our REIC and two architects.” 

In the fall, Carter went to Industrial Roundtable, one of the largest student-run career fairs in the country, at Purdue. Not because she needed an internship. She was looking for more people to help.  

Carter was connected with someone who owns an engineering company in Florida, who then connected the team with a MEP engineer (mechanical, electrical and plumbing). Then, the national EWB organization got Purdue’s chapter connected with two structural engineers in Colorado. 

“I honestly questioned if we would ever be successful two years ago, and we may not have been if not for Jenna,” Oakes said. “Jenna is the reason our partnership is where it is today.” 

Carter said the project now has five professionals involved on a weekly basis and 10-12 talking to students every month and reviewing their work.  

“It’s just so cool to see how many people want to be involved in this work, and we are so excited to make it happen,” she said.  

Carter can look back on the process now and see how she grew — had to grow — in order to accomplish what needed to be done.  

In short, EWB-USA and Purdue changed her. 

“I came into Purdue very shy, very timid, and I did not feel confident in my skills in writing emails, in my professional communication,” Carter said. “I think that, for me, felt like the biggest challenge, just getting over that hump of it’s scary but I have to do it. It was a really good lesson to learn because now I know it has to get done, I’m going to do it and it’s over. 

“I’ve had the chance to put myself out in the world a lot, and I’ve been pushed out in the world a lot. (Purdue) has done a lot for me in terms of my confidence and my professional communication skills.” 

Bigger picture 

Though the logistics and legwork so far have been extensive — even though Carter says her role was only “1%” of what will be a long project — it always has been important to keep the purpose of the mission in mind.  

This project isn’t just about getting a structure built.  

It’s about the people who will use it.  

The community has come together to be involved in the resiliency center project. A grant proposal was submitted in November 2024 to assist in the project.  

The Grand Caillou/Dulac Band (GCD) Native American tribe, located south of Houma, has lived in their traditional ancestral villages for centuries. The environment has shaped how they live. Historically, they sustained themselves by trapping, fishing, hunting and farming — as more than 85% of the parish is water and wetlands. But over the past few decades, repeated flooding, oil drilling in the region, land erosion and rising sea levels have contributed to a high rate of coastal land loss.

Then one of the most destructive storms in Louisiana’s history made landfall.

To assess the damage and needs in order to execute the project, students in Purdue’s EWB-USA chapter had to visit Louisiana. In the first semester they had the project, four students traveled south over fall break and met members of the tribe. One of the students was working on a senior design project, which got folded into the EWB-USA project, and ultimately provided a floating garden for the community.  

During multiple trips to Louisiana, students could see the community had been working hard to rebuild. They met with elder chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar, tribal chief Devon N. Parfait and deputy chief Crystlyn Rodrigue. They were invited by one of the elders in the tribe for a tour of the bayou on his shrimp boat. They learned about the climate challenges in the region; about the Mississippi River Delta sinking; about how the region loses an average of a football field of land every 100 minutes; about how every day has become a fight to save their tribe from losing their homelands, culture and identity; about how they persevere.

In October 2024, after Hurricane Helene hit, the students pivoted the purpose of a scheduled trip to help tear down moldy drywall and pick up debris.

Yes, this is a formal, educational partnership, Purdue and Houma.  

But the connection is much deeper than that.  

“It’s like family,” Carter said. “Every time we go down there, we’re all hugging. They’re excited to have us back. They love seeing kids who have been there before that they know. They’re invested in us just as much as we are in them.” 

Though the garden produced in the senior design project hasn’t made a significant impact in terms of food production, it has served as a focal point for the community and a place for them to meet and connect.

The community center project hopes to do the same, and even now, it seems to be working. Some people of indigenous descent from the tribe who have been disconnected have been standing on the edge of meetings, watching and listening, Carter said.  

“It’s just an honor to be able to work with them and be a small part of their bigger picture,” Carter said. “It’s reinforced the fact I can make my own difference in a little way, and it can still be meaningful to people.”  

Heart to serve 

It’s not surprising how Carter has approached the project. She’s always had a spirit of compassion. 

She sheepishly admits she was the “smart kid” in high school — not exactly the best label to have at that age —but she worked to change the narrative to be known as “helpful” instead. Because, well, she was. She’d take study periods to help friends with physics homework. She’d look for ways to make someone’s life easier.  

That continued at Purdue with EWB-USA: As a junior, she received the Bruce Helfert award that recognizes academic excellence and students who demonstrate social concern, and she also was honored with the Spirit of EPICS award. She has passed the project lead baton and is now winding down her undergrad semesters by helping students at Purdue University in Indianapolis start an EWB chapter.

“Some people get caught up on, ‘I want to revolutionize the world.’ I don’t want to revolutionize the world. I just want to do something that makes someone’s life a little bit better,” Carter said.

She’s intent on continuing that mission by focusing on structural engineering in graduate school at Purdue next fall so she can work on transportation infrastructure in Indiana. Her experiences have helped her find meaning and purpose in helping communities.

Oakes has no doubt she’ll continue to impact the world, in whatever way she chooses. 

“Jenna may be leaving the largest impact of any student I have worked with,” said Oakes, who estimates he’s taught more than 10,000 students in 26 years at Purdue.