> ALSO INSIDE: Students go global with new opportunities >> Researchers are making headway on tra c safety >> ]]> CSE has doubled the number of students participating in some type of study abroad program in the last 10 years. “The rst time I went—it was a lot of museums, a lot of tours, which I think was wonderful. But I was looking for- ward to getting to know students my age and looking at the research side of things.” Among the research sites they took in were Imec (formerly the Inter- university Microelectronics Centre) in Leuven, Belgium; the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany; and the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (German Electron Synchrotron) in Hamburg, where the students took a walk through a closed-down tunnel of the massive research particle accelerator. “We actually got to go look inside of the accelerator and walk around the track where they would shoot the particles,” said Harper. In addition to touring, the group interacted with faculty and students at the research institutions. “Meeting the students in Germany was a great experience. We were able to compare our engineering experiences in our respective countries,” said Harper. “We also learned about research being done in both academia and industry in Germany and Belgium, and experienced many of the experiments in person.” Her rst day in Hamburg, she and a few other jet-lagged students decided to explore the city center. They got lost and because no one had an international data plan for their phone, the group used a paper map for the rst time in years. “Picture ve super tech-savvy engineers without all of our gadgets, who had just stepped off the plane, in the rain, Sam Finnegan spent last summer in Macedonia as an intern modeling objects and machines in three dimenstions using a software program. During his free hours, he visited sites such as the Monastery of Saint Naum located on a high cli above Lake Ohrid. WINTER 2016 23 ]]> Europe is the most popular destination to study abroad for University of Minnesota students. There he teamed up with a Macedonian post doc who was impact testing industrial materials. Finnegan’s job was to use SolidWorks, a computer-aided design and engineering program to model objects and machines in three dimensions. The SolidWorks representation was a step in the complex math analysis of the impact testing. His roommates were Polish and Swiss, and he worked with people from Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, Germany, Finland, and Norway. Finnegan considered himself the fortunate one as, “there were interns from all over the world and English turned out to be the common language. Yet, they weren't all uent in English,” he said. What fascinated him most was the workplace milieu. It was much more relaxed than the internship he had in the United States the year before. “In Macedonia the whole feel is a lot more laid back,” Finnegan said. “There were some of the friendliest people I’ve ever met. Every night you go to a bar, you go to a cafe. That’s the standard. It’s more about the people. You always go to coffee. I went to coffee many times with my boss. I think the most valuable lesson learned was how important it is to cultivate personal relationships.” Even though Macedonia may not be on anyone’s list of global high-tech centers, Finnegan said the internship was a “good decision.” A senior now, he anticipates looking for a job in advanced manufacturing. He gures employers will look for employees willing to “go out of their comfort zone.” “I was planning to have an internship that summer. Being able to do it abroad, I was able to check off two things from my to-do list, and now I won’t have to delay my graduation at all,” Finnegan said. Ben Gelhaus: Teaming up in Tanzania Ben Gelhaus, a chemical engineer- ing senior, wanted to go abroad, but didn’t want to delay graduation. So he looked at one of the winter break, shorter-term Global Technical Seminars. “This one stood out to me,” he said. The seminar was “Design for Life: Water in Tanzania,” led by Paul Strykowski, CSE associate dean of undergraduate programs and professor of mechanical engineering. CSE students who signed up for the seminar were sent to Tanzania to engineer solutions to water supply problems. Working with St. Paul Partners, a nonpro t organization, CSE students provide the plan, St. Paul Partners raises money, and local WINTER 2016 25 ]]> were held in France, Ireland, and Italy in January 2016. “A better water system was needed for sure,” said Gelhaus. “Our challenge was to go in there and gure out how to get water to where it was needed.” Gelhaus and the team soon con rmed the water supply was adequate. They did some quick calculations on the exist- ing pipes. The design seemed proper, however, the students suspected that hard water had caused the pipes to scale. “The scale was decreasing the water pressure and increasing the friction so water couldn’t pass through the pipes,” Gelhaus said. “It was all about collecting as much data as you possibly could,” he said. Team members interviewed hospi- tal staff about the facility, water use, and water demand. Team members often heard widely varying answers to questions. Tanzanians provide the labor to complete the project months after the students have returned home. In January 2015, Gelhaus traveled with 11 other CSE students to Dar es Salaam. Over a few days, they traveled by bus to Iringa and then to villages in the countryside. Gelhaus was one of four students sent to a hospital in Illula, a city of 28,000 where livestock run wild and children played everywhere. The hospital was a complex of small, clean buildings for care and housing—without adequate water. The local fundi bomba—Swahili for “plumber”—regularly had to open and close pipes to route the feeble supply to the various buildings. Chemical engineering senior Benjamin Gelhaus participated in a short- term Global Technical Seminar last winter break, "Design for Life: Water in Tanzania," that focused on engineering water supply solutions for a hospital in Dar es Salaam. 26 INVENTING TOMORROW RICHARD G. ANDERSON ]]>