Bachelor of Engineering

 - American University of Beirut: 2009 - 2013

Erik Zakhia obtained his Bachelor of Engineering (BE) in Mechanical Engineering from the American University of Beirut (AUB), With Distinctions (Final grade: 86.6 / 100 - GPA 3.75 / 4), having been six semesters over eight on the Dean's Honors List.

Erik took a great diversity of courses, such as advanced Mathematics and Physics, Statics (Autocad), Materials Engineering, Thermodynamics, Robotics, Hydraulic Engineering, Electric circuits, Programming (C++, Matlab, Labview), Renewable energies, but also two courses about English Literature, a course about Environmental ethics, and two Creative Writing classes.

Erik obtained high grades in almost all the courses he followed, but he didn't limit his university experience to studying.

In between 2010 - 2011, Erik made a politically engaged choice, deciding to struggle against the choice of the Italian government led by Berlusconi to build four nuclear power plants in Italy, that would implicate huge investments. In Erik's beliefs, public money should be invested in truly sustainable projects, and, in his opinion, nuclear energy does not respond to the criteria of sustainability. Therefore, from Lebanon, Erik engaged himself in an online campaign using social media platforms in order to convince fellow Italian citizens to vote against the construction of the four nuclear power plants, in the popular referendum that would take place in 2011. Erik, thanks to his engineering background, and his capacity to write clearly and precisely, and to argue efficiently, became one of the administrator of a Facebook page counting tens of thousands of followers, taking the time, after his studying hours, to answer all the persons who had doubts about the use of nuclear energy, wondering if it could be the solution. Erik spent hundreds of hours in this struggle, that proved itself winning at the end, as the Italian people voted against the construction of nuclear power plants, and the government of Berlusconi was forced to abandon its project. In Erik's opinion, the solution to the energetical challenges is through a clever mix of renewable energies combined with a degrowth policy (encouraging people to live a slower life, and to consume local goods, and to produce as much as they can themselves, instead of relying on importations, that consume a lot of energy).

In between 2011 and 2012, Erik Zakhia became the President of the Environmental Club of the American University of Beirut. In parallel to his studies, Erik led a group of eighty volunteers (forty of them were regularly active) in a variety of projects. Erik launched a vast university campaign to try to decrease the energy and electricity use on campus, raising awareness about how much energy is wasted while using air conditioners, advocating instead to open windows and connect with the external surroundings on a campus where hundreds of trees grow. As the President of the Environmental Club Erik also devised and launched a carpooling website, the first one in Lebanon, called www.autopooling.com, with the help of a computer engineer. In this way, Erik encouraged the students and employees of the American University of Beirut to carpool instead of taking their own cars, as the university is located in one of the busyiest neighborhoods of Beirut (Hamra), directly by the Mediterranean Sea. The echo of the carpooling website Erik launched, by his own initiative, reached far beyond the walls of university, and he was thus interviewed by several national newspapers, a radio and a television, and these interviews are still available online. The third project Erik worked on was encouraging recycling at university. Another iconic action the Environmental Club led by Erik was a tree planting organized in the middle of the streets of Hamra, the bustling neighborhood around the American University of Beirut. The students themselves planted trees along the sidewalks, with the collaboration of the Municipality of Beirut. The passion of Erik for the environmental struggle made his face known at university, and years afterwards, many people still remember the actions of the Environmental Club that was presided by him, as the kind of projects that were undertaken by Erik were daring, ambitious, creative, and successful, starting from zero.

In 2013, while Erik finished his studies at the American University of Beirut, he started working on his first, serious project to write a novel. The aim of Erik was to write a historical novel taking place in Mount Lebanon, in between the 1600s and 1800s. Therefore, Erik dedicated hundreds of hours of his time to do historical research, in the Library of the American University of Beirut, that is the largest library of the entire Middle East, and that contains a lot of old books, in various langaguages. Erik read dozens and dozens of history books, traveler diaries, written in the past centuries, to get an accurate image of how life looked like in the 1600s in Mount Lebanon. Erik started building the plot of his historical novel, but his writing project was interrupted by the end of his studies at the American University of Beirut, and the start of his master studies at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Another hobby that Erik developed, in parallel with his studies, his environmental activities, reading, writing, and planting, was hiking. During these four years spent at the American University of Beirut, Erik explored in the company of a few friends, many regions of Lebanon, some close to the sea, and other remote places within the mountains. Lebanon counts thousands of historical sites that are not even mapped, and Erik developed a passion to discover these places no one knew about, in order to later inspire himself from them in the novels he would write. These historical places date back to 1000, 2000 or even 3000 years backward, and are often located in beautiful natural places of wilderness (forests, valleys, rivers, etc.) difficult of access. 

The picture below was taken during one of those explorations, discovering a medieval, crusader, abandoned castle in a village called Smar Jbeil. Later on, this castle was restored. But the first time Erik visited it, it was filled with wild flowers, and a shepherd had brought his sheep to eat the grass, and drink from the abandoned castle wells. The legend says the castle of Smar Jbeil has a hundred wells. The origins of Smar Jbeil go back to the Phoenicians, 3000 years ago. Smar Jbeil counts several beautiful churchs, and a roofless church carpeted with glanses that fall from the nearby centuries old oak tree.