The Trip Ended. The Mindset Didn’t.

EWB Immersive Study Tour

How might we engineer for a problem that won’t hold still?

Meet Sofie. Former Water Engineer at Aurecon.

 

Sofie spent just over a week in Vanuatu on the 2025 EWB Immersive Study Tour. The focus was climate resilience in the Pacific. What made it land was the range of it.

It started in Port Vila, the capital, learning the local context. Then a homestay in a community that has weathered multiple tropical cyclones and sits directly in the path of climate impacts. That is where it got real. Not theory. The lived experience of how communities respond and rebuild.

Then back to Port Vila to meet local government officials and emergency management agencies. How they see the challenges. What they are actually doing about them.

But the biggest takeaway was not a tool or a technique.

BeforeTrained, like most of us, to converge fast on the answer.

AfterLearning to sit in the uncertainty. To keep asking questions even when they make the problem more complex, not less.

That is the part she carried home. It is now how she works through the ill defined problems that land on her desk in Australia.

Are you Ready to sit in the uncertainty?

Register your interest

The Immersive Study Tour

A field based program for engineers who want to work on real resilience challenges alongside the communities living them.

Where On the ground, with communities on the front line of climate change.	How long Just over a week. Short enough to commit to. Long enough to change how you work.
What you do Learn the local context, live in a community, and meet the officials and agencies building resilience.	Who it is for Professional Engineers ready to trade certainty for curiosity, and to be useful inside ambiguity.
The next chapter Next, we are heading on Country to learn from First Nations Australians. Over 60,000 years of resilience, land management and systems thinking.

Are you ready to solve what comes next?

Register your interest

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The full story

Sofie’s Week in Vanuatu

Sofie is an engineer. She is from Australia. She likes things to make sense.

The way she worked

Engineers are taught to be quick. Find the problem. Fix it. Move on. For a long time, that was Sofie’s way too.

Then she went to Vanuatu

She spent just over a week there. She went to learn about the big storms hitting the Pacific. And what they do to the people who live there.

A family by the sea

She stayed with a family on their island. Storms had hit them again and again. She saw what that is really like. Not from a report. From their kitchen. From their stories.

Not from a report. From their kitchen. From their stories.

She watched how they pick themselves back up. How they get ready for the next one.

Then she went back to the capital, Port Vila. She met the leaders of the town. She met the people who plan for storms. She heard how hard it all is.

Sitting in the not-knowing

Sofie asked a lot of questions that week. Some answers came. Many did not. Often things got more confusing, not less.

That was the lesson. To sit in the not-knowing. To keep asking, even when it feels murky. To trust the process.

“One of the key things that I took out of this experience was definitely about the ability to sit in uncertainty.”

— Sofie, in her own words

What she brought home

Sofie is back in Australia now. The hard, messy problems still land on her desk. But she meets them differently now. She waits. She asks. She trusts the process.

Thank you

You helped send Sofie to Vanuatu. You helped her learn to listen. To sit with hard questions. To work beside people, not above them. That is what your kindness builds. Thank you.

What is an EWB immersive?
It’s a trip. About a week long. Engineers go somewhere new. They stay with the people who live there. They don’t go to fix things fast. They go to listen. They learn how people live. Then they bring that listening home. Back to their everyday work.
That’s it. A week of listening and learning that changes how you work for the rest of your career.
See the next immersive

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Note: This story has been edited from an original transcript.

EWB
IMMERSIVE STUDY TOUR
CLIMATE RESILIENCE
PACIFIC
VANUATU

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Where to from here

What’s next?

This program might not be the right fit for you yet. There is a whole pathway of ways to get involved at EWB Australia. Find the one that fits where you are right now.

If you’re at school

STEM Discovery
See what engineering really looks like, through hands-on challenges you can try yourself.
Explore STEM Discovery for school students

Youth Outreach Workshops
For teachers. Bring a real engineer and real problems into your classroom.
Book a workshop for your school

If you’re at university

The EWB Challenge
Take on a real community project as part of your degree. Over 10,000 students do it every year.
Take the EWB Challenge at university

Design Summit
Spend your break solving real problems beside a community, overseas or on Country.
Apply for a Design Summit as a student

Student Volunteering
Want to get stuck in now? Join the movement as a student volunteer.
Volunteer with EWB as a student

If you’re a working professional

EWB AUSTRALIA IMMERSIVE 
Cape York, Queensland Immersive 2026 
A week in the field, for professionals already in their career. The program you just read about. Learn to sit with hard problems and bring that thinking back to your work.
Explore immersive programs for professionals

Want to keep exploring

Stories of Indigenous Engineering
Explore over 60,000 years of engineering knowledge from First Nations Australians.
Read Indigenous engineering stories

Not sure where you fit?
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