Customized Engineering Semester with Roma Tre University
The November 2016 issue of Insights featured a visit to the construction site for Metro C, Rome’s third subway line, with a group of Civil Engineering students from Texas A&M University. The visit was part of a faculty-directed summer program with Texas A&M University. While the Metro C’s construction is still underway (and will be for years), as of Spring 2019, the A&M summer program has transformed into a customized spring semester in collaboration with Roma Tre University.
Designed and led by professor Luca Quadrifoglio, the semester program offers students 300-level Texas A&M courses held at Roma Tre University’s main Engineering campus. Course are taught in English by both A&M and local Roma Tre faculty and are also open to Italian undergraduates. Students fulfill core degree requirements with courses such as Transportation Engineering, Civil Engineering Systems, and Fluid Dynamics, among others.
The program provides students with the unique opportunity to experience engineering challenges within an international context, considering the cultural and historical factors that shape both problem and solution in Rome.
The program is enriched by a series of overnight excursions and daytrips throughout Italy, including a study tour to the mountainous Abruzzo region to extract samples and make measurements for a Roma Tre Geology course. Though the courses were taught on-campus, faculty regularly incorporated visits to relevant local companies and sites such as an Aprilia motorcycle factory and the Peschiera-Capore aqueduct in the Rieti province, which provides 85% of Rome’s water.
Optional internships provide practical experience in a local context, allowing students to apply their studies to a different cultural paradigm and position themselves for future study and career objectives. This spring, students completed Engineering internships with projects related to hydraulic engineering and flood risk management, as well as gas and oil. Other students received research placements within the transport and structural engineering laboratories at the Roma Tre Department of Engineering.
The youngest of Rome’s public research universities, Roma Tre was founded in 1992 and today enrolls over 35,000 students in twelve departments. With an urban campus in the heart of Rome’s central Ostiense neighborhood, Roma Tre is by far the capital’s most internationally-minded public university. Because Ostiense was the heart of Rome’s industrial production in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the campus includes a number of cutting-edge renovations of factories and storehouses that today house classrooms, labs, and auditoriums. Roma Tre currently offers the following programs in English: Biomedical Engineering, Law, Economics, Business, Geology, and International Studies.
Photography: Marco Liberatore
Accent partners with U.S. colleges and universities to design and support customized semester programs and can facilitate development conversations with local universities for direct enrollment programs or hybrid programs including both custom courses for the U.S. students and courses at the local university.
