So I need to to tell you about Thursday, Friday, and a little about this weekend’s adventures. Thursday was a normal school day but Friday was a half day. La Universidad de Antonio Nebrija only has classes in the morning on Fridays so that it can offer field trips during the afternoon.

While we were in England, we visited various historic locations throughout London, Oxford, Cambridge, Windsor, Stonehenge, and Canterbury. I also got the opportunity to go to Amsterdam in the Netherlands while I was abroad.

I attended ECAM-Lyon in Lyon, France for 6 weeks through the IPL International Summer School. I took classes at both the CPE Lyon and ECAM campus. I took 3 hours of French class in the morning and 4 hours of engineering class in the afternoon 4 days a week. My French class was intermediate level and all in French.

My “Semester at Sea” has been thus far amazing. The theme of the short-term voyage is “Engineering a New Tomorrow.” I have enjoyed learning about my course, Human Factors Engineering.

The program I settled on is a UT featured mini-term trip called “From the Cloister to the College: The Birth of the University” and focuses primarily on ancient English history.  England has always fascinated me due its ancient and vibrant past.

The Southeastern Conference (SEC) engineering colleges, which include the University of Tennessee Tickle College of Engineering, have signed an exchange agreement with the Turin Polytechnic (Politecnico di Torino). The agreement will allow University of Tennessee students to study at Torino, one of the best schools in Europe, for a semester.

Today the group was taken on a tour of Cambridge University.  Though it’s blasphemous to say, considering that the two are ancient rivals, I found it very similar to Oxford.  The teaching methods, multiple colleges, and detailed architecture were similar to each other, if very different from a typical U.S. college.