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Ready. Set. Go! Intel Education Service Corp is heading to Egypt.
by Mustapha Abdulai
For the next two weeks we will be in Egypt, partnering with CARE International, to improve the utilization rate of the Intel-powered Classmate PCs donated by the Egyptian Ministry of Education and installed in about 20 schools in and around the governorates of Minya and Beni Suef. To say that I'm excited about this trip will be an understatement and I know all my teammates fell the same way, for some of team (including myself) this will be our first time in Egypt. Our team - Hadj Attlassy and Gina Rophael from Arizona, Bassam Jomaa from Santa Clara, Hicham Arafa from Cairo and I - has spent the past 5 weeks planning this trip. We all know it will be quite an adventure and yet we also understand that each of us will experience it differently, coming from very diverse backgrounds.
Our biggest concern so far is that we don't know why the utilization rate is so low in some schools. Is this because the PCs are no longer functional? Are the programs installed still functioning and relevant and in the correct language? Are the current teachers and students well trained? We have tried to think through all the possibilities but we are certain that we would encounter some conditions we could not predict. We've loaded all the software we think might need, but will this be enough?
Our goal is to make sure that we leave each of the 20+ schools we plan to visit with 100% working classmate PCs, with as many teachers and IT staff trained, with a set of tools to quickly fixing the PCs and having trained at least 80% of the students.
I'm looking forward to sharing our exciting adventures in Minya and Beni Suef, for now we have to go complete our last minute packing, load images onto our USB sticks and make some hard decisions. (Should I bring my iPhone?)
PS: Catch up on the adventures, experiences and learnings from the other IESC teams.
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About the Blogger
Mustapha Abdulai is a Test R&D Engineer with Sort Test Technology (STTD) Group where he is designs Intel's Platforms Test systems.
Mustapha joined Intel 2005 and a Rotation Engineer where he worked on Signal Integrity for the QPI bus and automation for the Class Tester, he moved to STTD one year later to design Platform Test systems. He designed the platform test systems for 65nm and 45nm platforms and now leads the xPV Signal Integrity and Power Delivery Working Group.
Mustapha was born and raised in Ghana and moved to the US to begin his college career. He holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University and a MSc in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University. He currently lives in Hillsboro, Oregon with his family where he spends his time outside of work with this family, playing soccer, hiking and taking apart old computers.