Emily Dunn – Chemical Engineering
Despite being a Pitt run program with some Pitt faculty and all Pitt students, the classes I took in
Florence had a completely different environment from what I am used to. As a chemical
engineering student, I was accustomed to long daily lectures with the same classmates, which
was the style of this program. The addition of taking these classes with the same people you live
with and spend all your free time with added a level of comfort that I don’t normally see back at
Pitt. We often had full class discussions where many of my classmates participated (again unlike
Pitt where sometimes a professor asks a question and receives answers from the same people).
The engineering course I took consisted of three group projects, which enhanced the
collaborative nature of the class. I got to work with three different groups for each assignment—
each with a different combination of engineering disciplines. It was interesting to see how these
people I had gotten to know outside of the classroom worked in an academic setting. My favorite
group had to be our Da Vinci Bridge Challenge, which was not (entirely) just because my group
won. I hadn’t had a group project tasked with building something ever, and it was exciting to see
my civil engineering teammates working in their element.
For this project, we went above and beyond what were probably our professor’s expectations.
We took wood from a construction site (with permission from a very kind, and probably very
confused, employee) and sawed it down to make a free-standing bridge without supports. My
teammate and I were tasked with creating the presentation for this project, where we elected to
create a trailer. We were able to be very creative with our presentation, which is again not typical
for classes at Pitt.
In addition to the engineering course, we also took an art history class with a focus on the
artwork of Florence from the Renaissance. Almost every class, we would visit a church,
museum, or other monument that we learned about during our lectures. Over the month, we got
to see paintings and sculptures by artists like Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and
more! Being in a city where incredible history is just a 15-minute walk away is an indescribable
feeling. It was also interesting to learn about Renaissance painters in several different ways, as
most artists of the time were also engineers. Being exposed to the “same” material viewed from a
different lens enhanced my understanding of the material.
When I return to Pitt, it will be hard to readjust to the normal classroom, where we don’t take
hour long field trips to cultural sites or make trailers for our projects.
Swanson School of Engineering 