While the project is still in its planning stage, Bedard envisions a smartphone application that uses GPS and can tell students and other Penn State community members where to go, depending on the emergency.
“We’re trying to give students the ability to respond without being specifically told what to do, so we’re creating more educated adults,” he said.
And Bedard is getting others involved along the way.
The Penn State Emergency Management Club, which he helped establish in the fall, is contributing its knowledge of geographic information systems (GIS) to figure out what location on the University Park campus is going to be safest for different types of hazards.
“On top of that, they’re also going to be working on flood mapping for Commonwealth Campuses,” Bedard, the club’s president, said.
He also has gotten two other campus organizations, the Red Cell Analytics Lab (RCAL) and the GIS Coalition, to help with some of the early projects, including hazard mapping for the 2013 Penn State Threat Hazard Identification Risk Assessment.
“We mapped out some of the hazards that Penn State is vulnerable to with the help from both of those clubs and created an entire hazard profile for Penn State,” Bedard said. “Everybody was really excited to do it, and everybody kept the due dates — which is saying something for a bunch of students who are doing something and not getting any sort of pay for it.”
The Student Preparedness Project is one of a few that Bedard worked on throughout his internship, which also included spearheading the University’s renewal of its StormReady certification through the National Weather Service, which requires a renewal every three years.
Bedard’s idea to have a dual internship was the first of its kind for both Penn State Emergency Management and the local National Weather Service office in State College, and it turned out well.
“Tom is the first student we’ve had who has had this real emergency management and weather linkage,” said Peter Jung, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service. “There’s certainly a lot of different avenues for students, and he is really good at coming up with new ways to reach people.”
The idea came from the marriage of two of Bedard’s interests: weather and emergency response.
During his first semester at Penn State, Bedard connected with the Penn State Emergency Medical Services Association during the fall Involvement Fair and took an emergency medical technician, or EMT, course in the spring.
After becoming an EMT, he worked his way up to being a teaching assistant for the EMT classes, a CPR instructor and then event logistics coordinator for Penn State Emergency Medical Services, which includes organizing equipment for events, such as football and basketball games.
“I would tack onto that creating event action plans, which are operational schedules, and that really started to blend well with then putting a weather forecast into that,” Bedard added.