Cornell
- Cantabria
Exchange Program
Cornell
- Cantabria
Exchange Program
Spend your junior year in Spain!
Welcome to the home page of a new program developed by the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Cornell University with the goal of facilitating Cornell College of Engineering students to spend their junior year in Santander, Spain at the Universidad de Cantabria (this link has a very nice introductory movie to U. Cantabria, and information on the university in English, can be found here). The new program will officially launch August 2007 with eight members of the Class of 2009 participating. Current sophomores and freshman (Classes of 2009 & 2010) interested in such an experience are particularly encouraged to fill out the survey of initial interest (link below). Anyone interested in studying Engineering or working as an engineering in Spain is encouraged to complete the survey.
The proposed program is being developed around School of Civil & Environmental Engineering core course requirements but students in other majors (the first group of students includes CEE, BEE, and indepdendent Engineering majors) nterested in the program should fill out the survey and begin looking at the flexibility of their own major for study abroad.
The program allows up to 20 Cornell College of Engineering students to participate in the program each year. The first group of students is arriving in Santander, Spain in August of 2007 and will take two emersion Spanish language course (one for the month of August and one for the first 3 weeks of September). A second group of students is arriving in Santander in time to take just the September emersion Spanish language course. The language requirement for applying to the program is the completion of SpanR 123 or its equivalent or demonstration of this background through scoring a minimum of 56 on the Language Placement Spanish (LPS) exam offered online by the Department of Romance Studies.
The Cornell group of Juniors is paired one-for-one with Universidad de Cantabria Engineering 3rd year students and the total group of students (16 for the 2007-2008 academic year) will begin taking fall semester classes around the 4th week of September. The student group will take four Cornell CEE equivalent junior year engineering core courses, to be taught in English, and the Cornell group will take a fifth course in Spanish language taught entirely in Spanish, equivalent to SpanR 3xx level, or another liberal distribution studies course taught in Spanish.
The second semester will begins around the 3rd
week of February and again four core CEE Cornell equivalent junior year courses will be
offered in English and a liberal studies course, developed especially for this
program on Prehistoric European Art, will be taught in Spanish.
The Universidad de
Cantabria together with the Instituto del Prehistoria (Institute of Prehistory)
house many of the leading world exports in this field, due to their proximity to
the Altamira Cave (a UNESCO World
Heritage site, 30 km from Santander).
Any students with the language skills to take regularly scheduled
Universidad de Cantabria courses may do so at any time as students are
fully registered Cantabrian students. 
The second semester final exams finish in June and interested students then have the option of being placed in a Spanish engineering firm for an internship experience before returning to Cornell to complete their senior year in Ithaca. The Cantabrian students paired with the Cornell students in Santander will spend their 4th year at Cornell forming a true exchange program and it is a goal of the program to create opportunities for the entire group of students to continue to interact and support each other during this second year.
If you are interested in being kept apprised about the development of this program please follow the link below to a brief survey to collect contact information, feedback about your interest, and general availability.
At right: Cornell Class of 2009 student with their Cantabrian peers, Jose (Pepe) Revilla (Director of E.T.S de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos), Federico Gutierrez-Solana (Chancellor of the University of Cantabria), Angel Agud (Economic Advisor of the Cantabrian Goverment).
If you have any questions about the proposed program our studying engineering in Spain please contact Prof. Cowen in CEE - he would be more than happy to hear from you.