VLAG FLASH - August 2007, Edition 10
On Sunday April 15, 2007, we flew to Boston with a group of ten people for a 10 day study trip to 5 different universities and the R&D facilities of 2 companies. The main goal of the trip was knowledge exchange with US universities and companies and to make contacts for possible research collaborations in the future. Also, we hoped to get an idea of the cultural differences between scientific research in Wageningen and in the US.
The start of our tour was in Amherst where we visited Massachusetts University during a state holiday. We got a tour trough their facilities. At lunch-time, we started the 5 hour drive to Ithaca. The closer we came to Ithaca, the deeper the snow.
On Tuesday morning, at Cornell university, we presented our work to a group of staff members. In the afternoon we first got a tour trough their labs and pilot plant, followed by research presentations by Cornell graduate students.
The next morning, we had to leave early for University Park, to visit Penn State university. The food science group had a very nice, new building. During our visit, we had a lot of time to interact with the local students, making it a very interesting visit.
Thursday, we made a more disappointing visit to Heinz R&D in Pittsburgh. After a short tour trough their pilot plants, we presented our work for only 3 employees of Heinz. So their wasn't much interaction. Even the goodie-bag didn't make up for that...
By the end of the week, the weather had completely changed from the rain and snow, to some warm and sunny weather. We visited Ohio State University on Friday. After an interesting session of presentations alternating between our and their students, we had quite some time to visit the enormous campus before we had a BBQ! At night, some Ohio State students took us for a drink in the city center to finish first week of our program.
In the weekend, we had some time off to visit Chicago. This city was quite a bit bigger than the cities we had seen until then. It was nice to see so many sky scrapers (off course, we visited the Sears Tower) and just walk around the city. In this way, we could relax after the busy program of the first week.
We left Chicago for Madison on Sunday evening. Monday, we visited Wisconsin University. During the whole program, a large group of local graduate students was present. After the presentations, we split up in small groups based on research interest for discussions. At the end of the day, they organised a very nice Mexican dinner. After dinner, most of us enjoyed a nice evening at the local student pub as well.
Tuesday morning, on our way back to Chicago, we visited a local dairy farm that produces their own cheeses on-farm. We got an nice tour around the farm and saw the cheese plant as well.
Our last visit was to Kraft R&D in Chicago. After the presentation about Kraft R&D, a lot of Kraft researchers listened to our presentations. Unfortunately, we couldn't see much of their facilities.
Looking back, the trip was very successful. The universities we visited were very different from each other, giving us a good overview of scientific research in the US. Also, the time spent together as PhD students has been very useful to get to know each other better, especially because not all of us work in the same place.
