At the Puerto Rico Project Center WPI students and faculty work closely with sponsoring organizations on projects with local and regional impacts. Projects address complex problems faced by local sponsors, and student teams bring new approaches and unconventional thinking to develop potential solutions.

The project center in Puerto Rico is one of our longest continuously operating project centers, having hosted groups of students every year since 1992. Based in San Juan, students work in interdisciplinary teams with sponsoring organizations both in the metropolitan area and elsewhere around the island. Teams work for a total of 14 weeks on projects identified by their sponsors, and are on-site in Puerto Rico for the last 7 weeks of work.

Puerto Rico projects focus on sustainable community development and include a diverse portfolio of themes related to community climate resilience, livelihood improvement, and environmental management. Our partners include non-profit organizations and government agencies (federal and Puerto Rican), with a strong focus on small communities and their grassroots initiatives. In the coming years, we will be working on an exciting set of integrated projects focused on building community climate resilience and repurposing elementary schools that have been abandoned by the state into community centers that can enhance resilience to natural disasters, turning a loss from austerity cuts and the out-migration of the Puerto Rican population into critical resources for local communities.

More about WPI’s global projects program can be found here.