Study Abroad Program Offers Engineering Students a "Double-Header" in Australia

By Diane S. Kukich

Prof. Sue McNeil may be an Australian native, but that’s not why she took a group of students to Melbourne for a Study Abroad program over Winter Session 2008. 

“The city has a phenomenal network of trains, trams, and buses,” she says.  Melbourne’s world-class public transportation system provided fertile ground for the civil engineering professor to teach CIEG351, Transportation Engineering, from a new perspective.

“When I teach it here in Delaware, the course is very highway oriented,” McNeil says. “Taking it to Australia enabled the students to learn about public transportation first-hand.”

McNeil wasted no time exposing the 35 students, an almost-equal mix of civil and mechanical engineering majors, to the system.  For their first assignment, she sent them out in pairs to travel to specified destinations using a combination of transportation modes and recording their travel and wait times in a diary.

 “The students quickly learned what worked and what didn’t,” McNeil says, “and the strategy got them acclimated to the city and provided them with information they could use to get around for the rest of the trip.”

“Using public transportation in a big city was something I hadn’t done before, so this was a very valuable experience,” says Christine Melvin, a junior majoring in civil engineering.  “By the end of the trip, I was giving directions to Australians.”

Led by Prof. Leonard Schwartz of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, who teaches CIEG305, Fluid Mechanics, the program marked the first time that students on a UD Study Abroad trip had the opportunity to take two engineering classes.  Schwartz has done the Australia trip several times, but the second course has traditionally been a geography class taught by a local faculty member in Tasmania.

Fluid Mechanics is a required course for both civil and mechanical engineering majors, while Transportation Engineering is a requirement for CEs and an elective for MEs.

This combination had tremendous appeal for the students in both departments.  “The opportunity to take two core classes over Winter Session and lighten the load during the semester was great,” says TiAwna Moffatt.  “And to do it in an amazing country—how can you beat that?”

Field trips for the program comprised a blend of course-related tours and sightseeing excursions, including a visit to the control room of CityLink, a public-private toll road in Melbourne with state-of-the-art traffic monitoring and control; a day trip on the Great Ocean Road, with its famous rugged coastline; and a tour of the Australia Road Research Board (ARRB) facilities.

The students also visited the Healesville Animal Sanctuary and attended the first day of the Australian Open Tennis tournament.

A three-day trip to Tasmania enabled the group to visit the Woolnorth Wind Farm, the largest wind farm in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Australian Maritime College, where they toured various testing facilities, including a towing tank, a cavitation tunnel, and a model test basin.  “This was great,” says ME junior Katelyn Staley, “because we were able to see actual applications of fluid mechanics.”

 “Tasmania was the most memorable part of the trip for me,” says Moffatt, “because it felt like we were experiencing the ‘real Australia’—it was very rural and quiet.  I’m a city person myself, from Baltimore, so being in this environment really pushed me.  I would never have gone on a hike on my own, but that’s all there was to do there, so I did it.  And it turned out to be great—we all really bonded on that trip, and then we carried that feeling over to our work, where we learned how to solve problems together.”

Melvin was also impressed with Tasmania.  “Two of our three nights we stayed in a small town called Stanley on the northwestern coast, where our group of about 35 raised the population by almost ten percent,” she says.  “Because the area was so sparsely populated, the night sky was filled with more stars than I had ever seen.  It was amazing to see so many layers and dimensions of what exists beyond our planet.”

All of the students found the trip to be well-planned and organized, with the faculty members providing a carefully selected slate of real-life experiences to complement classwork.  “The instructors were great,” says Staley.  “They wanted us to learn what we needed to learn for the courses, but they also knew that we wanted to explore the country.”

The accommodations got high marks as well.  The group spent the bulk of their stay, 28 days, at Swinbourne Residential College in Melbourne, a part of Swinburne
University of Technology.  Bakeries, stores, and an Olympic-size outdoor swimming pool were all within walking distance, and bi-weekly tutorials were made more palatable by barbecues on campus.

Language problems were minimal, although the students had to learn some of the local lingo, including use of the word “rubbish” for trash and ordering food “for take away.”  In general, the food was mostly familiar to the students, although Melvin notes that some of the unusual aspects of the menu included “seeing kangaroo for sale in the grocery store and being served beets on almost everything.”

But, as with most Study Abroad programs, the participants all felt that the most lasting benefits of the trip were the intangibles. 

“Going to Australia made me realize how little I know about the rest of the world,” says Staley, “and how much people in other countries know about us.”
Melvin and Moffatt were both surprised at how knowledgeable Australians are about American politics. 

“Many people on the trains would actually strike up conversations with us about the presidential election, and the candidates’ faces were often on the front pages of newspapers,” says Melvin. 
 “It seems like our news is their news,” Moffatt adds.

All of the students appreciated the opportunity to get to know students in the “rival” major better.  “It was good to be with the MEs,” says Moffatt, “because we’re so wrapped up in our own major when we’re on campus.  After we spent time together on the trip, we realized that we all have challenges—they’re just different.”