Engagement in Practice: Engineering at a Monastery - Integrating Course Content with Community Engagement by Building a Better Maple Sap Evaporator

I am a monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Br. Lawrence, and in addition to seminary studies I work in our college as a lab assistant to the physics department. After finishing seminary I will go on to graduate studies in physics so as to teach in the college. Two years ago some monks and students came together to make maple syrup by tapping local maple trees. In the second year we constructed our own evaporator and this year we are working with an engineering course to design a sap preheater system to improve the evaporator’s efficiency.