Even in midst of windstorm / healthcare systems engineering major invested in hometown

Aidan Ferens’ early years may have been spent in Washington, D.C., but the roots of this South Dakota State University incoming sophomore are deeply entrenched in the Dakota prairie.

Ferens’ parents moved to the Highmore ranch where his mother grew up when Ferens was 6 years old. He was one of 13 students in the Highmore High School Class of 2025. Four of them continued their education at SDSU. One other also are enrolled in the Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering, but Ferens is the only one to major in healthcare systems engineering, a program which the college started one year ago.

Like the move to the Haiwick ranch 4 miles east and 2 miles south of Highmore, the transition to college and a brand-new major has been a smooth one.

“It was great,” Ferens said of this freshman year. “I met a lot of people that I had no clue were going to SDSU (such as people from neighboring towns), and there are quite a few from Highmore going to SDSU. Every day in classes, I was talking to people who I haven’t talked to in three or four years.

“My first year also was exactly what I wanted for an academic challenge. Our high school was limited in the opportunities it could give students in terms of coursework. I wanted a challenge and to push myself. I found an academic challenge and the opportunity to tour different facilities.”

Healthcare systems engineering integrates engineering, computer science, data science, management and health sciences in one four-year bachelor’s degree. The students’ courses are a unique blend of classes already offered by the university — some within the college and some, like human anatomy, outside of the college.

Whereas civil or mechanical engineering students may be in the same classes as many of their fellow majors, that’s not currently the case for healthcare systems engineering majors.

Hence, Dean Sanjeev Kumar, a major promoter of the major, has held monthly meetings with the students. “We’ve had a lot of different discussions about how to build the camaraderie between healthcare systems engineering students,” Ferens said.

Community awaken to storm alert

Growing up in a Highmore, a town of 682 in the center of South Dakota, Ferens knows about camaraderie.

It was in full force June 29 and the days after. A windstorm with gusts to the level of an EF2 tornado (131 miles per hour) left the town devastated. “Everyone got an alert on their phones at 6 a.m. We went to the basement and hopped on the radar. We knew it was going to be bad, but we didn’t grasp how bad of a situation it would be.  

“The storm hit at 6:40 at my place. It was over by 7 a.m. We started assessing the damage and started calling friends and asking how they were.”

Thankfully, no one was killed or injured during the windstorm. (There were some injuries during the cleanup.)

In comparison to many others in Highmore, the Haiwick ranch escaped major damage — “We lost two barn doors, we had a tree fall into the side of metal building, a branch knocked out a storm window, and we lost about 25 trees.

“We started cleaning up right after the storm hit. We soon realized we were a little short on the chainsaw department for how many trees we were going to have to cut down, so I called all my friends and I drove to Miller, which is 23 miles east of us, and picked up a bunch of supplies, a chainsaw for one of my friends, filled gas cans and filled generators.”

(Note: The ranch and other rural areas were without power for eight hours. The town was without power from Monday morning until Wednesday afternoon.)

Turning the focus on helping others

After dealing with the trees at the Haiwick ranch, Ferens went to a friend’s grandparents’ house, where the assignment was to pull a tree off their house and cut down four more trees that were shattered apart by the storm.

Those were the highlights for Day One. The remainder of the week was constant 10-hour days of cutting trees, using a payloader to pick up debris and helping wherever possible.

“On Tuesday I started helping one of my friends whose parents owned four storage unit buildings around town. One was undamaged, but one was completely blown in on itself. You couldn’t tell what was what. It was just a big pile of broken lumber and people’s stuff.” Extracting the building rubble from people’s personal belongings was a challenge, he said.

Ferens and his friends would “drive around to find different things to pick up, helping out wherever we could.”

Ferens, friends spend week meeting needs

The entire week was basically see a need and meet it. “The first day there wasn’t much organization. As the week went on, the county emergency management team had RF (radio frequency) ID tags for us so they could track where the help was.  But no one was handing out assignments. It was call your friends and see if there is anything you could do to help. 

“We’d get a pickup full of guys and start picking things up. I don’t even know how many truckloads we took” to the tree and debris piles.

Ferens said the tree pile grew to the size of a football field long and one football field wide at the site of a fertilizer plant that had recently been torn down. The debris pile, right across the road from the tree pile, measures at least 160- by 100-feet, he said.

A month later, the cleanup is virtually complete, and roofing crews are busy. Ferens’ attention has turned to haying and other chores on the ranch. In town, especially in the business district, the recovery will be slower and perhaps not at all. While Ferens loves Highmore, he does admit that the community’s lack of resources does create a challenge.

Seeks to make a difference in rural health care

That is part of the reason he chose to major in healthcare systems engineering.

In Highmore, the nearest major hospitals are 50 miles to Pierre or 200 miles to Sioux Falls for advanced cases. The time commitment to go to Sioux Falls can be a challenge in an ag community, and for some there is the added cost of travel and lodging, Ferens said.

“With my education, it is my hope I could do something that would benefit a lot of the people I grew up around. There is a lot of new technology where you could get consultation from a healthcare professional without having to make the six-hour round trip to Sioux Falls. Giving rural South Dakota more access is what pushed me to healthcare systems engineering. It felt like something I could invest in and really make a difference with,” Ferens said.

What that will look like is to be determined.

He noted that among the activities of healthcare systems engineering majors last school year was listening to the vice president of international affairs for an Elk River, Minnesota, medical device manufacturer.

“He showed us the website of all the engineering positions at this firm — software engineer, process engineer, manufacturing engineers, data science engineer,” Ferens said. “There wasn’t a single one of them that you would say a healthcare engineer wouldn’t be qualified to do that. 

“There is a very wide array of opportunities (with healthcare systems engineering), and not every single one of them starts with healthcare.”