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2014 Students Exchange Program in Europe
Published：17/10/2014
Recently，2014 IESD autumn school—a short-term academic exchange program to Italy, Spain and France achieved a big success. This program was jointly organized by Tongji University with Venice International University(VIU)，University of Barcelona（UB）and Toulouse National Institute of Applied Sciences（INSA-Toulouse）.The exchange group consisted of 15 students and lasted 22 days from 18th September to 9th October. This activity was held by centralized teaching lectures in combined with laboratory professional training，interactive communication and field visiting trips. It is well worth mentioning that these three universities all particularly introduced their individual international master exchange programs that would be very useful for those students who have plans for further study abroad.
Topics of the lectures offered by VIU included issues on globalization and sustainable development，architecture characteristics with water collection and treatment systems in Venice，history and culture of Venice and Italian class. The field visiting trips covered hydrogeological investigation along the Lagoon，rainbow island sightseeing and VIU campus tour.
Teaching courses offered by UB begin with its long history as well as Spanish and Catalan language in the morning. Then in the afternoon it was very lucky to have the opportunity to visit the ancient and beautiful campus of the oldest university in Catalonia. Finally it was ended up with visiting the water treatment laboratory. During the stay period in Barcelona, 2014 International Chemical Exhibition and World Chemical Summit just happened to be held in Barcelona, students were very lucky to have chance to witness a variety of cutting-edge technologies in the chemical industry, including a large number of emerging technologies in environmental engineering and science.
The last station was INSA-Toulouse. Tongji’s old friend, Professor Michelle given an academic lecture on depicts the idea regarding river sewage treatment in the future. A number of professors from the department of chemistry guided to visit their research laboratories and explained what they were focused on. In the remaining time, the students had very hot interactive communications with postgraduates from INSA to discuss and compare different education systems between China and France and visited Toulouse museum of aerospace technology and Toulouse sewage treatment plant together. In the last day, Professor Michelle led the students to experience the beautiful scenery and enjoy the unique style of Toulouse.
This kind of free, open and pluralistic exchange study experience provided a good platform for the students to exercise their ability to live and study independently. Meanwhile, it also broadened their horizon that they had the opportunity to know the education systems in European countries, research dynamics and scientific achievements as well as academic culture. In addition, field interviews and investigations were also conducted in some European famous cities such as Paris, Cannes and Roma, visiting local tourist attractions and learn about the history, culture and customs of various countries or cities. Of course, as college students majored in environmental professions, they didn’t forget to distribute questionnaires to local citizens along the passing cities to understand and learn their advanced practices and experience on energy, water treatment, solid waste treatment and waste classifications that the students could benefit much from this experience which is unable to be obtained from textbook.
This successful autumn school would play a profound impact on the students who took participate in this exchange program that would be helpful to promote China’s environmental protection, which was the direction of struggle for all students majored in environmental professions.
