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.

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 of Jenison worked in Switzerland at a branch of Milwaukee-based electronics component producer Rockwell Automations. Leslie Kuipers of Gainesville, N.Y., worked at the Otto Von Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany. And Matt Dykhouse of Lambton, Ont., 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.