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Imogen: Hi, I'm Imogen and I'm a process engineering student at QUT.
Phillip: Hi, I'm Phillip, I'm a mechanical engineering student at QUT.
Imogen: With the process engineering trip we got to go to Southern Germany for 10 days,
so we got to visit Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Pforzheim and Munich, and it was funded by
QUT. It was a really great experience. We went with Dr Tom Rainey and he's one of the
process engineers at QUT that we get to talk to a lot, it's really nice to have a process
engineer there to ask questions and stuff. Phillip: We went and saw various factories
around Germany, we went to see BMW, Porsche, the paper mill Sappi, BASF.
Imogen: It was really important that when we were over there that we got to see German
engineering and these, like, mega factories, and it was really great to see some of the
things that we've kind of learned at QUT. Phillip: Because I'm a mechanical engineer
I enjoyed all of the car factories and just seeing how all the machinery was working because
they had a lot of robotics, they had all the automation just integrated into their work.
Imogen: For me the highlights would be BASF which is the biggest chemical company in the
world, and it's on 10 square kilometres of land and it's just huge. I really enjoyed
that in Germany that it wasn't all just structured, that we had to do exactly by an itinerary
so we kind of had one engineering kind of thing to do each day and then the rest of
the day we had personal free time, so although our days did go from like five am to five
pm there was only a short chunk, for instance, that we were touring a factory and the rest
of the time we'd just take the GPS and get as lost as possible and just kind of have
an adventure. Phillip: I remember when we went to Munich
we went on one of these adventures and we discovered Christmas markets, and we spent
a couple of hours just exploring there. Imogen: Christmas is huge over there, it's
giant and so going to all the markets for everything was super cheap and the food was
amazing, there was drinks and everything so it was pretty good. My biggest advice for
anyone going on an abroad exchange is learn the language, like even if it's just a few
words definitely if we knew a little bit more German I think we would have had a really,
really good time. And so for me personally I found it fascinating to see things that
we'd learned in the classroom in the real world, it kind of makes you feel "Oh my gosh,
I do actually know stuff, I'm not going to go to a factory when I graduate and blow stuff
up, I kind of have more skills than I anticipated", so that was really cool.