Dr. Wes Hines, head of the Department of Nuclear Engineering, led twelve students on a tour of nuclear facilities in Prague, Czech Republic, during a mini-term program abroad in May of 2013. The students also participated in a reactor-physics training program for which they will receive upper-division laboratory credit in the nuclear engineering program.

With the expansion of the College of Engineering’s faculty-led engineering programs this summer, our application pool has greatly increased, and the College is very pleased to be able to respond to this demand and support a larger number of students for programs this year.

The College of Engineering has announced the initial student exchange between the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering (MABE) and the Politecnico de Torino in Turin, Italy, this spring.

During the last mini-term, a group of students from the College of Engineering did a three-credit faculty-led study-abroad class on “Sustainable Energy Engineering” in the Republic of Ireland. Ireland is one of the leading countries to have invested greatly in sustainability.

We arrived in Prague just before 11:00 a.m. local time. At this point we had been traveling for over twenty hours straight, and we were tired. But the excitement in the group was palpable. Some of the students had never been out of the southeastern United States, much less all the way to Europe. Spring…

Along with about twenty-five students from UT and Alabama, it was an amazing three weeks in the Alps. We stayed in Austria with field trips to Germany, Italy and Switzerland. Austria is amazing!

As classes in Knoxville drew to an end and our classmates graduated, all of the students in Torino were still busy attending lectures and labs. The Italian class schedule instead requires students to continue attending classes until mid-June.

Going abroad has never really appealed to me. It takes time, money, and willingness to do touristy things, all things that a college guy like me tries to avoid.That being said, I decided to try it out for a short time by going on a week-long faculty-led trip to Madrid, Spain.

While at the Instituto Nacional Tecnica Aeroespacial (INTA), our group was allowed to see numerous things which would otherwise be unavailable to most people and most students for that matter. The INTA program is much akin to the US’s NASA, primarily working on aeronautics design and testing as well as research based on findings from…