Hi! My name is Ana Palacios, and I am a freshman hoping to study Mechanical Engineering or Electrical Engineering. In high school, I was significantly involved in my community's sustainability initiatives, primarily focusing on environmental justice, policy, and circular economy. However, I love making things and have enjoyed my summers working at start-ups. Specifically, I designed and built a mountain biking pump track near my school, and I worked at a machine learning and data science consulting start-up based in Mexico City last summer.
Thus, at Stanford, I hope to gain the technical background, connections, and experience I need to break into the climate-tech entrepreneurship landscape. I joined this project-based class to learn how to make my ideas feasible and impactful. I hope the design thinking process can help me correctly identify a problem in Latin America and give me some of the tools I need to find a solution through human-centered, functional design.