Rose-Hulman Expands Global Educational Opportunities

The officials from Germany, Japan, India and South Korea were invited to Rose-Hulman with the same purpose in mind, to expand global education programs to benefit our faculty and students.  A hectic six-month schedule of activities this fall on campus and overseas has already resulted in new educational opportunities.

In early December, Rose-Hulman signed a three-year extension of its exchange agreement with Kanazawa Institute of Technology (KIT) in Japan.  On the same day the agreement was signed, Rose-Hulman faculty and students were in Sweden working with colleagues at the University of Uppsala on a joint engineering project. 

“It’s very important as we plan for the Institute’s future that we recognize the global context in which our graduates will work,” stated Rose-Hulman President John Midgley.  “In the future, Rose-Hulman will establish more extensive educational partnerships outside the United States that will include academic as well as cultural and extracurricular opportunities,” he said.

Midgley welcomed a six-member delegation from KIT that included the Institute’s President Ken’ichi Ishikawa.  Other KIT representatives visiting were its dean of academic affairs, chief of institutional planning, chief of university-industry collaboration, director of international programs, and the dean of institutional assessment and evaluation.

“One of our goals is to expand the KIT partnership so our students and those at KIT can partner on projects, similar to the activity with Uppsala” explained Art Western, vice president for academic affairs at Rose-Hulman.

The Rose-Hulman and Swedish teams are working on a project dealing with an online based training system for use by the medical professionals.  The Rose-Hulman group that visited Sweden consisted of four computer science and software engineering (CSSE) students along CSSE department head Cary Laxer, and Dan Moore, associate dean of the faculty and professor of electrical and computer engineering.  The teams also participated in the Swedish National Center for Technology Education in Students' Contest Workshop on Collaboration in Engineering Education.

"The workshop brought together international educators to discuss global cooperation at the undergraduate level," Moore said.

A few months prior to the trip to Sweden, Moore was at Changwon University in South Korea where he was a guest lecturer and met with university officials.  As a result, two Changwon students are now enrolled at Rose-Hulman. 

German educators from Fachhochschule Ulm met with German Professor Andreas Michel and other humanities and social sciences faculty on campus in November to further discuss the enrollment of Rose-Hulman students in the university’s summer programs. 

“Three students have already applied for the program,” stated Heidemarie Heeter, associate professor of German at Rose-Hulman.  “We anticipate receiving applicants for the two junior abroad programs at the universities in Stuttgart and Magdeburg, and the summer program at Stuttgart.  Nine students completed the program last summer,” she said.

Heeter is also trying to find internships for five students who want to work in Germany this summer for multinational companies. 

Four Rose-Hulman students are now enrolled at the University of Stuttgart and an equal number are studying this academic year at the University of Magdeburg, according to Heeter. 

Faculty are quickly responding to requests from students wanting to be the first from Rose-Hulman to study in certain locales.

“I’ve facilitated educational opportunities for students who wanted to study in Chile and France,” noted Spanish Professor John Gardner.  Students interested in spending six-weeks this summer studying culture and language in Spain have already been in contact with Gardner. 

India will be another location where Rose-Hulman students may soon be able to learn more about the international engineering and business environments.  Charles Joenathan, head of the Rose-Hulman Department of Physics and Optical Engineering, will visit at least seven engineering colleges in India in coming months. In September, Rose-Hulman hosted renown optical engineer Rajpal Singh Sirohi, director of the India Institute of Technology, who invited Rose-Hulman officials to India to further discuss the creation of an exchange program.