Fotos del alumno de intercambio internacional de la MIC Francisco Sojka

Presentamos el testimonio del alumno de intercambio en el curso de Seminario de tesis 2 de la Maestría en Ingeniería Civil Francisco Sojka de University CTU (República Checa), quien visitó la PUCP durante el semestre 2019-2 para recibir la co-asesoría de la Dra. Iris Domínguez en la elaboración de su tesis de maestría titulada “Assessment of stormwater management in Ayacucho, Peru”.

Escrito por: Francisco Sojka alumno alumno de intercambio internacional de la Maestría en Ingeniería Civil PUCP

From August to December 2019 I became a student in the PUCP for one semester. I was sent to Peru from my home university CTU in Czech Republic to write my master’s thesis “Assessment of stormwater management in Ayacucho, Peru” under the guidance of Dra. Iris Domínguez Talavera from PUCP and doc. Ing. David Stránský, Ph.D. from CTU. The goal of my master’s thesis was to analyse and evaluate the current stormwater system in the city of Ayacucho. I wrote most of my thesis in Lima but managed to visit Ayacucho for a couple of days and do some physical exploration with the help of the local students. 

Foto del alumno de intercambio internacional de la MIC Francisco Sojka en su visita a Ayacucho (Perú)

My experience with the PUCP wasn’t so intense as with other students who took classes regularly. I didn’t attend university every day, only once a week to consult the progress of my thesis with Dra. Domínguez. We discussed not just the thesis but general experiences and differences of the academical life in Czech Republic and in Peru. Also thanks to the great help of my assessor I obtained documentation describing the project of stormwater drainage in the city of Ayacucho, which I used in my thesis. There are many problems with such drainage, the biggest one it being just a temporary solution to the problem of torrential rains and not actually a solving solution. 

Sadly the documentation was not ideal, but the greatest problem was the absence of a proper dataset for a simulation in the SWMM software. The scarcity of hydrological data is not uncommon but that is a shortage affecting many countries worldwide, not just Peru. Although the calibration of the model was impossible due to missing data, the simulation in SWMM was performed assuming values from the literature and using available data. 

Thanks to my couple of months in Lima I believe I obtained at least a little bit of perspective and a lot of new horizons to our problems in Czech Republic and in my personal life. 

I would recommend Peru as a must visit country and would like to thank my university for giving me the opportunity to be in Peru for a semester, and PUCP for giving me a chance to study there and learn. 

Link to my master’s thesis: https://dspace.cvut.cz/handle/10467/86494 

Maestría en Ingeniería Civil PUCP