Samantha Exum
This summer, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in the affiliate Texas A&M Environmental Engineering in Belgium study abroad program. For six incredible weeks, I was able to live in the charming town of Leuven, Belgium, while studying air pollution engineering and water quality. In addition to traditional lectures, we also went on a variety of field trips to different water treatment and incineration plants! My favorite trip was to the Delta Works, a hydraulic flood prevention system in the Netherlands, and an ASCE-designated civil engineering wonder of the world. Other especially cool field trip stops included a visit to a pig farm featuring an innovative constructed wetland for waste treatment and a coastal water production plant with a built-in groundwater recharge system. I loved getting to see what we were learning in the classroom applied in the real world, and these site visits deepened my passion for water quality and water resources engineering.
While classes and field trips were very interesting, they only comprised three days of the week; one major highlight of this program was four-day weekends. Throughout our time abroad, my fellow classmates and I got to visit countries such as the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Germany, Italy (and the Vatican!), Germany, Austria, Ireland, and Poland. I was fortunate enough to travel to Switzerland, where I hiked in the breathtaking Swiss Alps and swam in the alpine rivers with some of my classmates. Every city I explored was unique, and I loved learning about the differing cultures in these regions. Living and traveling in foreign countries was such a personally enriching experience, and I grew so much through these experiences. Whether it was learning to use a different country’s train system, navigating the variety of languages being spoken around us, or interacting with the locals of each town, this experience truly forced me out of my comfort zone and taught me so much about what it means to be a global citizen.
Studying abroad has truly been the highlight of my academic career at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and I am so grateful to have been able to go.
