Lauren Arikol is not the typical teenage girl. It’s not that she doesn’t enjoy spending time with friends or playing sports like other teenage girls. But unlike others, Lauren has an innate interest in engineering. So much so that she was willing to skip basketball practices and give up holiday weekends to be part of National Engineers Week Future City Competition, an educational engineering program that challenges seventh- and eighth-grade students to design a city of the future. Future City is not for the weak-hearted. This rigorous competition calls for teams of three students to engineer a city set anywhere in the universe after the year 2150. Each city’s plan must account for industry, agriculture, architecture, residential housing, and even energy sources. The teams must write a 700-word essay detailing their plan, present their concept and answer questions from judges, prepare a computer-simulated design of their entire city, and build a scaled model of one portion of their city. None of this deterred Lauren and her two teammates. For nearly six months, the three girls committed much of their free time to planning their futuristic city. L'Etoile Directice was the result. Set in 2152, L'Etoile Directice was not located on Mars or one of the Saturn rings. Instead, it was set in the Gulf of Mexico, just south of the girls’ home state of Louisiana. Months before Louisiana residents would know the names “Katrina” or “Rita”, these three teenage girls (with the guidance of a teacher sponsor and an experienced engineer mentor) designed the futuristic city of L’Etoile Directice with the specific purpose of protecting Louisiana’s eroding wetlands from the threat of hurricanes and the churning currents stirred by the Mississippi River. With its strategic placement and a unique star shape, the city itself was engineered to withstand hurricane force winds and at the same time buffer the Louisiana coastline from severe storms. In addition, the futuristic city’s location could help to redirect the Mississippi River’s strong circular currents that flow into the Gulf and erode more than a million yards of coastline each year. It was perhaps this worthy ecological purpose that set Lauren and her team’s project apart from other entries in the regional Future City competition and ultimately led to her team winning the national competition in Washington D.C. The first place prize was a week at Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. While that week was a once in a lifetime experience she and her friends will not soon forget, Lauren values equally the experience she gained from working on the Future City project. At 14, she is already quite certain that she wants to become an engineer. At Shell, we are proud to sponsor programs like the Future City Competition that challenge and inspire creative minds like Lauren’s. Perhaps one day, in the not so distant future, Lauren will help Shell design offshore drilling rigs that can withstand hurricane force winds. Whatever she does, we know Lauren’s future is bright – as bright as a star. For more information on Future City, visit their website at  www.futurecity.org.
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