Mira Shah, a 4th year Major in Mechanical Engineering and a Minor in Energy and Resources, received a 1st place undergraduate scholarship from The American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) in April of 2024. Her background experience, educational goals, and most importantly, her passion for the cause highlighted her as a model candidate for ASHRAE’s scholarship committee.
Shah speaks about her early interests in the engineering field. “I was in robotics when I was in high school, and so I really got involved in working in hands-on engineering, designing and building things.”
Attending Berkeley opened up a wide range of possibilities for how Shah could use her major to make a difference in society.
“I was always interested in applying engineering to…have a positive impact on the world, and when I was a sophomore here at Berkeley I took professor Dan Kamman’s class on Energy and Society. That’s what really got me interested in applying my engineering skills towards working on energy.”
This class was also how Shah discovered the ERG Minor. She has been able to take what she has learned from her ERG courses and apply it to her passion for engineering.
“Having the engineering solutions and technical decisions are important, but we also need to bring that together with the right policy and economic models in order to move the energy transition forward,” Shah says.
Moreover, her Climate Adaptation course discussed ways to make infrastructure more resilient to the extreme weather events our community will face as a result of climate change, while her Energy Economics course with Professor Meredith Fowlie was her first exposure to the economics side of energy conservation. Together, these classes gave her literacy and breadth in significant topics for the energy transition.
Shah took an amazing opportunity to work at a start-up called SkyCool back in 2023. SkyCool Systems is a company that develops radiative cooling materials that use the sky as a renewable resource for cooling. They have about a dozen pilot sites across the country for their cooling panel technology, and have set up weather sensors at these sites to monitor how well the cooling works in different weather environments.
“I worked a lot with developing protocols to help [SkyCool] more efficiently assemble and troubleshoot [the sensors] so that they were working and capturing data closer to 100% of the time,” Shah explains.
Shah’s work at SkyCool also included an experiment she designed to compare their product to other cool roofing materials. After consulting with experts in the roofing industry, she ran the experiment and collected data. Her experiment validated that SkyCool’s product did work better than some industry competitors.
“Just being in the office, being able to hear our CEO on the phone with potential customers, [or] our engineering director working with different manufacturing companies to figure out if we could source the panel for cheaper. It was just a really good experience to [learn] how it works in a startup that’s trying to build a new product and a lot of the growing pains that come along with that.”
Shah discovered the ASHRAE scholarship opportunity through ERG’s email list for undergraduates interested in the Minor. Seeing that she fit the requirements for it exceptionally well, she wrote an essay detailing her experiences in Energy and Resources at ERG, as well as the hands-on experiences she obtained from her internship at SkyCool. It was then no surprise when Shah won the first place ASHRAE scholarship award, receiving $8,000 for her Berkeley tuition.
“That was an awesome opportunity to have. It validates my interest and experience in energy. I was able to convey the passion I have for working towards decarbonization and clean energy, and they were able to recognize that.”
When asking Shah about how ERG’s minor program encouraged her to want to learn more about energy, she had a definitive answer. “I’ve gotten involved over the past two years in trying to take advantage of resources from ERG. There’s a lot of opportunities at Berkeley that I think have helped me advance and develop my interest in energy.”