Vicki Cline sends students to far-off, majestic lands. And they call this studying?

Vicki Cline wears many hats in Materials Engineering: from undergraduate and graduate advisor to coordinator of the study abroad program. Here, she answers a few of our questions.

Has the school hitched on to the globalization bandwagon?

Yes, definitely. I started in Materials Engineering in 1989. Prior to the time I arrived, I can’t find any evidence of our school’s undergraduate students studying abroad. Since then, the profile and nature of our students has changed a great deal. The college has put a priority on developing the global engineer, and that’s caused us to really push global experience with students. The school initiated the concept of study abroad in 1997 through an agreement with Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. When Alex King joined the school as head, he continued our strong interest in study abroad. And professors Keith Bowman, Matthew Krane, and Kevin Trumble developed a global studies proposal that got the ball rolling with our Materials Engineering Study Abroad (MESA) program. Today, we’re gaining momentum. Every time a student goes abroad, they give a presentation to our undergraduate seminar-which builds enthusiasm among students. We’re averaging three or four presentations each semester.

So, it’s not hard to sell study abroad to students?

Not at all. When it comes to students who express an interest, there are two types. For some, there’s no need for a sales pitch. They come in with a plan, and it’s just a matter of deciding where to go. For others, they haven’t really considered traveling abroad before. However, once they hear one of their fellow classmates talk about their experiences and show incredible photos, they are bitten by the travel bug. The program sells itself. For future engineers, it is crucial to have an understanding of different cultures and approaches to engineering. The best way to accomplish this, obviously, is to actually be a part of other cultures for a period of time. Our current ratio of students participating in study abroad is 1-in-6. Right now, I believe that’s the highest in the college. We’ve set a goal of 1-in-3 students.

What are the obstacles to growing such a large program?

One of the biggest challenges involved is making sure students don’t lose time toward completing their degrees. We don’t want students to feel that studying abroad hinders their graduating on time. With the variety of programs worldwide, this can be a time-consuming effort. However, the university’s Study Abroad Office is excellent with assisting departments to resolve issues. Also, our faculty are encouraging and flexible toward study abroad, which helps a lot.

Last summer, I went to China as part of Purdue’s Global Partners Program. We visited four universities. The backgrounds of those selected to go varied from history, psychology, and sports to engineering. I was the only engineering representative.

I visited Tsinghua University, which is very similar to Purdue and to our materials engineering program. However, since their class structure is different-and there is still a language barrier in most courses-we couldn’t find a match in coursework. Tsinghua teaches 41 courses in English; but only one such course in the spring semester. Also, there’s not a large selection of courses our students can pick in any one semester for their major. So, we got creative and came up with a model that we could use: We established a research arrangement. This arrangement is very similar to how our students pursue independent research with our own faculty. Students are allowed to count the independent research credit towards the technical elective requirement of our plan of study. We currently have one sophomore in China involved in two research projects and a class on China’s culture. Tsinghua is now talking about some of their students expressing an interest to come to Purdue. That’s exactly what the program was targeted to do.

We’re focusing now on study abroad internships. We’re looking at arranging partnerships with industries that’ll extend our students’ stay after their academic session. Some of our partner schools have developed models where a student can attend class for part of the day and then go to their internship. We’d like to start growing these relationships.

- Lee Lamb