VACorps Alumni Interview: Eduardo Glenn ('25)

Eduardo interned as a mechanical design engineer at a local engineering-focused organization in Cape Town, won a national karting championship back home, and spent weeks doing sea turtle conservation on a remote Costa Rican beach with no WiFi in sight. He recently sat down with Julia Rogers on the Gap Year Radio podcast to share his story, and we’ve pulled together the highlights below. Eduardo is now studying mechanical engineering with an aerospace concentration at Colorado State University.

What were the highlights of your internship experience in Cape Town?

• I was a mechanical design intern at a local engineering-focused organization, which makes drone blimps, originally designed to deliver health supplies like blood to remote parts of Africa that don’t have roads. When I was there, the project was about using the blimps to scan the Amazon forest with LiDAR technology, because they can fly longer than conventional drones and reach places that are otherwise almost impossible to access.
• They’d give me a part and say: we need this, you have to design it, manufacture it, and optimise it. Every pound counts on a blimp, so they’d be like, you have to cut 60% of the weight. I was learning 3D design, 3D manufacturing, sitting in on all the meetings, seeing how they tracked their progress. I was obviously slower than everyone — the things I did in a month they could have done in two hours, but just being part of that team, being trusted with real work, was really enriching for me. It was my first internship, and honestly my dream internship. In Costa Rica there’s basically no aerospace industry, so this was spot on for what I wanted.
• And Cape Town itself? Amazing. I still talk to the friends I made there, we’re reminiscing right now about how one year ago we were all in South Africa. We did skydiving, bungee jumping off one of the tallest bridges in the world, beach trips, saw the penguins. The four-day work week with three-day weekends was great because you could actually go on proper longer trips and explore. I did almost every single excursion.

You also did sea turtle conservation in Costa Rica — what was that experience like?

That was one of the things I had specifically planned for my gap year just connecting with nature. I went to Santa Teresa with CIRENAS. The poaching industry in Costa Rica is pretty big people sell turtle eggs and meat, so we were there to protect the nests. We’d move the eggs to a safe area, hand-build new nests using a specific technique, track when they were due to hatch, and then release the hatchlings into the ocean.

I was pretty lucky with timing when I arrived, a whole wave of turtles came and started laying eggs. Everyone was calling me the lucky token. I saw three turtles laying eggs in one single night, which apparently doesn’t always happen that easily.

The night patrols were just walking the beach in the dark, completely isolated; no WiFi, no service, no anything. But you could see the Milky Way, all the constellations. At the end of the patrol, we’d just sit on the beach and watch the stars. I’d say magical is the word. And just being truly isolated from everything, with only your own thoughts for company; that turned out to be one of the most valuable experiences of the whole year.

Can you share an example of how your gap year experience aided your personal growth?

The biggest thing for me was learning to just be with myself. During the beach patrol especially, no WiFi, no service, no anything, I had to learn to be happy in my own company. That’s something that really grew during the gap year. Here at college, everyone feels this pressure: oh, I have to go out every night, I have to be at every party. I get the FOMO. But I can also genuinely enjoy time just being in my dorm, or going out for a walk on my own. Learning that during a gap year was really essential for me now. And as someone from Costa Rica coming to college in the U.S., I also had questions in the back of my mind is my English good enough? Will I be able to connect with Americans? VACorps answered that completely. Living with other interns, navigating a foreign city, making friends from all over the world by the time I got to Colorado, I just walked in feeling ready. More ready than I would have been if I’d come straight from high school, for sure.

What’s the single most important piece of advice you’d give to someone considering a gap year?

Have a plan. It doesn’t need to be a schedule for every single week,  but have a clear goal that guides everything else. For me it was: I’m going to train a certain number of days a week, I’m going to race every race, I’m going to focus entirely on the championship. That goal guided every decision I made. The VACorps internship, the beach patrol, the travel, those were additions around that anchor. That’s why I didn’t waste the year.

I’ve seen people take a gap year and just drift. That’s really sad to see, because the potential is enormous, it can just slip away if you don’t use your time intentionally. Have something to guide you. And if you do that, the gap year will give you more than you expect.

And to anyone worried about falling behind, I don’t feel like there has been a single downside to taking my gap year. I’ve met so many people at college that I would never have known if I’d gone straight from high school. Some of my closest friends here are juniors and seniors. You don’t fall behind. You just arrive with more to bring.

PS — CIRENAS is the sea turtle conservation organization Eduardo worked with in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica. And if you want to hear the full conversation, listen to Eduardo’s episode of Gap Year Radio here.