From: Phil deHaan (dehp@calvin.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 27 2002 - 11:29:02 EDT
September 30, 2002 == FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A trio of Calvin College engineering students went on a European trip this
summer that was no vacation (although each student did enjoy some tourist-type
activities). The three, each of whom is now a Calvin senior, spent the summer
working in Europe as part of internships set up by Calvin professor Ned
Nielsen.
Engineering students at Calvin are not required to take a language, but Nielsen
believes strongly that they do need to experience other cultures.
"Engineering," he says, "is global. If you design a car, you've got to design
it for the world, not just the United States."
To help Calvin students gain that global perspective he has begun to utilize an
ever-growing hodgepodge of personal connections (ranging from people he's met at
engineering conferences to a man who sat next to his wife on an airplane) to
send students in his department overseas for a summer. Since 1998, he's placed
nine students with internships in Germany, two in Switzerland, one in Puerto
Rico and one in the Netherlands.
This past summer Lisa Velzen worked in Switzerland at a branch of
Milwaukee-based electronics component producer Rockwell Automations. Leslie
Kuipers worked at the Otto Von Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany. And
Matt Dykhouse worked in the Netherlands for Sulzer Repco, a company that repairs
turbines and other rotating equipment.
"Each student had both a valuable work experience and an interesting living
situation," says Nielsen.
Velzen lived in a small village with a single mother, who also worked for
Rockwell, and rode with her to work in the town of Aarau each day. Kuipers had
roommates from Pakistan and Slovakia, attended a Bible study at a local cafe led
by an American couple and made sand bags for the flooding which raged through
much of central Europe this summer. Meanwhile Dykhouse lived in a trailer in a
campground near Rotterdam and, though he was ready for a house by the end of the
summer, enjoyed the experience thoroughly.
Their jobs also were memorable. Velzen gained valuable experience in process
improvement and product development using Ideas (software similar to AutoCAD)
and made good contacts for future career possibilities. "If I ever want to come
back (to Rockwell Automations), they already know me," she says. Kuipers
researched how Rapid Prototyping, a method of creating physical objects from 3D
computer models, could be used in product development. After actually working
with Rapid Prototyping machines, he wrote a paper about his discoveries.
Dykhouse began his internship as a mechanic, getting an up-close feel for the
companies work. Then he moved to the planning office, where his
responsibilities included determining what kinds of repairs needed to be made
and making technical drawings for new parts. Dykhouse says it was a very
gratifying feeling to make a technical drawing of a part and "when it came back
from the shop it actually worked."
And each of the students learned a lot away from the workplace too.
Velzen says: "One of the biggest things I learned was the importance of
international awareness. I really learned that there's different ways of doing
things, and not always a right and wrong way. For example, the European and
United States school systems are very different, but both produce good
engineers."
Such words warm the heart of Nielsen whose work now has led to Calvin creating
a concentration for its engineering students in International engineering. The
requirements include a summer internship in a foreign country, demonstrated
competence in that country's language and participation in an overseas
engineering interim class.
~with reporting by media relations student writer Abe Huyser-Honig
-end-
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