Stephen Vandrak, Engineering Perspectives of the Renaissance and Sustainability: Florence Summer 2023
The classes I am enrolled in differ widely from anything I have experienced at Pitt. To start, the courses, engineering history and art history, are much different from what I have taken at Pitt. In engineering school, there are not many opportunities to learn about history and how history affects our lives today. These courses allow me to gain an understanding of how art and engineering developed during the Renaissance, and how those developments led to the concepts I have learned in previous engineering courses. I am also very interested in history, and I am glad I have a chance to merge my love of history with my engineering studies.
Along with the content, the style of learning is much different than anything I have taken at Pitt. For my art history class, we take time to learn about the different styles of art and how to recognize when and how those styles are used in the buildings of Florence. Once we learn about a specific building, we tour it with our professor. We are able to see the infrastructure and art pieces we have discussed in class. This opportunity is something only possible by studying abroad in a city like Florence, which has a wide array of renaissance art and architecture. At Pitt, my courses do not provide opportunities to see examples of what we have learned in class, so I am glad I have been given that chance here.
For the engineering history and sustainability course, I was given the opportunity to see specific places; we toured the Galileo museum and saw many different experiments he conducted. Also, we toured the Pitti Palace, which allowed us to examine aspects of passive design in infrastructure. The last thing we did was tour a sustainable farm in Italy. We toured the whole farm and saw aspects of the farm that use natural lighting and gravity to operate using less resources.
The one part of the program that was difficult was how much material we had to learn in a short period of time. Since the program was only 4 weeks long, we had to spend a lot of time learning everything we needed to know. I appreciated that our professors were understanding about the amount of work assigned and gave us enough time to complete everything, but the academic environment was very tense at some points. Since a main reason I chose this program was to see as much of Florence and I could, I had to balance the schoolwork with the exploring of the city. This balance was tiring, but it was a short enough time that I could work very hard and enjoy my off time without burning out.
This picture is me in front of the Duomo in the city center of Florence. This church was something we studied heavily in class, and we got to see in person the different styles and materials used.
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