Fellow:Marcela Yeckle



Name Marcela Yeckle School (Cohort) Universidad de Ingenieria & Tecnologia (2020 cohort) Majoring in Civil Engineering Country Peru Email Special:EmailUser/Marcelacyd

Biography

Marcela is a Civil Engineering Graduate from UTEC. Since high-school, she developed the value of empathy and service vocation collaborating in activities for kids in schools far from Lima. Also, Marcela is very related to folkloric dances, she considers it as a way to be connected with her culture and origins. There is one quote that she heard and completely loved to explain this topic:

"If you don't know where are you from, you don't know where are you going"

- Junior Benjarano (2019)

Since her freshman year (2018), she has been envolved in different kind of activities related to her major, such as the I+ Day, Meet&Greet and Open Day, activities organized by UTEC to motivate students at high-school to choose engineering and science majors. For Marcela, it is important to share our knowledge and experiences to people to get inspired and create great ideas to develop our society, that is why she founded the Student Chapter of Civil Engineering at UTEC. This way, she and her colleagues can share their major's knowledge to people interested and contribute in a few years to solve infrastructure problems in her country. She was also part of the process to establish an ASCE Student Chapter at UTEC. Marcela is very passionate about her career, so much so that she wanted to contribute to improving it, which is why she was the Spokeswoman of the Civil Engineering major in 2020, this initiative gives her the opportunity to create “meets & greets”, integration events and feedback forums on courses (everything in a virtual way).

Talking about her extracurricular activities, Marcela considers that an engineer has to be complete both academically as well as with soft skills, empathy and a vocation for service. She realized that her freshman year was really tough academically and emotionally, based on this experience, she wanted to help other freshman to avoid that them passed this difficult situations in a future, because of this she made the decision of taking part of the Peer Mentoring Program at UTEC. The objective of this program is to advice freshmen to reach their adequate incorporation to university, making sessions about freshman's interest and dynamic activities, all of this is made by students for students. As her performance in this program was excellent, she was chosen as the best peer mentor of the year, this recognition also gave her the opportunity to participate as one of the 4 UTEC representatives to participate in CADEuni 2019, an event that brings together leading students from universities throughout Peru to develop their leadership and create ideas to contribute to the development of the country. Also, in 2019 she was part of the Marketing and Communications area of the first edition of TEDxUTEC. Until 2022, she was collaborating in the Peer Mentoring Program and participating in Peer Coaching, a new initiative of student counseling in UTEC. And until last year she has helped the UTEC's Faculty Team to orientate the new candidates of the UIF Program. Nowadays she is advisoring as UIGuide to Latin-American universities to train new change agents.

At present, Marcela has already a plan for her future. She wants to be a multidisciplinary Civil Engineer focused, on one hand, on Urban Planning, connecting all departments, cities and towns so that everyone has access to the basic needs of a human being by applying new technologies, she wants to be part of a new generation of engineers with a humanistic profile, and also (after her experience abroad) be immersed in the investigation field, specifically in Mining Supervisions and Operations. In spite of all her plans, she always has in mind sharing all her knowledge learned in the UIF program to help her environment to be better each day.

Contact her about...

Making, designing and developing makerspaces
Innovation in Civil Engineering
Getting to know about Peru
Travelling around the world
Mental Health
Developing Educational Volunteerings (K12) for latinamerican children
Any opportunity that help her learning about Urban Data Science
Talking about your passions :))

Interesting facts about Marcela

She likes to take pictures of nature and significant moments in her life (you can see some pictures at this link). She would like to learn more about photography in a future.
She doesn't have a specific favorite band or musician. In fact, she likes to know about any type of music.
Marcela's favorite hobby is to make desserts.
Marcela is constantly looking for new experiences that involves travelling and knowing about new cultures.
She likes to make memes to explain aspects that people consider difficult to learn.

Achievements

Emerging Leaders in the Americas Program (ELAP) 2023 Scholarship Recipient (2022)
UTEC Spokeswoman of the Science Department (2021)
Honors Roll Recipient for Extracurricular Excelence in the Subcategory of University Community (2020-2021)
Vicepresident of ASTM-UTEC (2020 - 2021)
President of ASCE-UTEC [1] (2019 - 2021)
Best Peer Mentor (2019 - 2020)
UTEC Spokeswoman of the Civil Engineering Department (2020)
CADEuni 2019 UTEC Representative (2019)