The alarm came early. By 8 a.m. we were out the door and on our way to the airport, bags packed with souvenirs, dirty laundry, and two weeks’ worth of memories. Departure felt organized. Check-in and bag drop moved quickly, and security was smooth. The real test came at border control, where the EU’s new…
Author: Ellieana Myros
Hello! I'm Ellieana Myros from Allison Park, PA and I'm a sophomore in the Pitt School of Business. When I graduate in 2028, I look forward to pursuing my MBA and/or MHA.
Day 14- Off to Salzburg
When we got to choose how to spend our free day, I knew almost immediately where I wanted to go. My favorite sight of the trip so far had been Neuschwanstein, and I wanted to be near the Alps again. Salzburg, Austria felt like the right answer. Sound of Music country, a castle on a hill, water…
Day 13- Presentation
When you’re moving from city to city, factory to factory, you absorb the next thing and move on. Today was the first time I had to slow down and find the thread that connects to every place I have been on this trip. There is a thread. The central argument of this program is building around is one I’ve been circling since about day one. Germany is one of…
Day 12- Comparing Two Brands
After BMW, I wasn’t sure Audi could impress me in the same way. It did, but very differently. The facility itself felt more refined. Where BMW felt like an industrial city, Audi felt like a campus that had been thought through. There were more hands-on workers visible on the floor rather than the robot-dominated lines we saw at BMW. The production…
Day 11- Loud Mornings & Calm Afternoons
Today, we started the morning at Aumovio, an automotive supplier that makes the components most drivers never think about including brake systems, sensors, crash detection software, and the hardware embedded throughout modern vehicles. I’ll be honest, the lecture was dense and hard to follow at times, but the core idea stuck. Cars today are less machines and more computers on wheels….
Day 10: Engines, Art, and a Rebuilt City
Today was a full day in Nuremberg. We visited MAN truck and bus a precision engine plant in the morning, an underground wartime bunker in the afternoon, and then free time to just walk the city. By the end of it I felt like I had seen three completely different versions of the same place. …
Day 9: Dachau-Bearing Witness
At first, my mental image of Dachau came from films and photographs of Auschwitz with the scale, the chaos, the overwhelming visual horror of it. Dachau was different. It is a memorial site now, meaning much of what originally stood was rebuilt after the war for the purpose of education and remembrance. That context matters, because the…
Day 8: Munich-Prosperity, Culture, and the Weight of History
Walking into Munich I expected skyscrapers, but I found none. Munich is the third largest city in Germany, and nothing about the energy on the street lets you forget that. It was crowded, fast, and full in a way that reminded me of New York. But the skyline wasn’t there. What I learned is that Munich enforces strict…
Day 7: Halfway There
Today started quietly. Most of the students went to the Schaezlerpalais, which is a small palace/museum tucked into the city. The main room was stunning, and I wandered around it for a few minutes enjoying the architecture and design elements. The reporter of the day was William Wilkes from Bloomberg, and he covers Mercedes and Volkswagen Group primarily, going directly to…
Day 6: A Fairytale in the Alps
After two days of factory floors, loud machinery, and business presentations, driving into Füssen felt like stepping into a completely different country. I have never seen the Alps in person before, and nothing quite prepares you for them. Snowcapped peaks rising above small, quiet towns, the kind of landscape that doesn’t ask anything of you. It was exactly…
Day 5: KUKA- The Humans Behind the Machines
Before this trip I had now idea what KUKA was. However, the name is everywhere in industrial automation in the BMW plant, and I assumed the factory would look something like that. What I found was almost the opposite. There were more human workers on the KUKA factory floor than at the BMW plant we…
Day 4: BMW- More Than a Car Company
Nothing quite prepares you for the scale of the BMW facility. It functions less like a factory and more like a self-contained city. There were buses and trucks constantly moving parts between buildings, test tracks winding around the perimeter, and every corner of the campus buzzing with purpose. And yet, compared to BMW’s plant in…
Day 3: More in Common Than I Expected
Walking onto the University of Augsburg’s campus, the architecture stopped me immediately. It doesn’t look like any American university I’ve seen. Sleek, geometric, almost dystopian in a stylish way. My first thought was somewhere between The Hunger Games and Star Wars, but make it chic. The quiet was the other thing. Morning classes here are apparently not popular, and the campus reflected that. The German students…
Day 2: Guten Tag Augsburg!
Landing in Munich, the airport felt familiar in the way most international airports do, organized yet busy, and not quite what distinguishes a country from another. Customs took longer than expected. The EU’s new Entry/Exit System, which fully rolled out in April, now requires all non-EU travelers to submit fingerprints and a facial scan at the border, claiming to replace the old passport…
Day 1: Goodbye Pittsburgh!
Traveling has always been something I enjoy, but this trip felt different from the start. In the past, I’ve moved through airports and planes as part of a group where the decisions were largely made for me from my family. Today, even though we were technically traveling as a cohort, there was something freeing about…
Ein Prosit to Germany!
Hello! My name is Ellieana, and I am a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh in the School of Business and Frederick Honors College, pursuing a double major in Global Management and Finance with a certificate in Nonprofit Management. Outside of the classroom, I hold a deep passion for my work as an intern on…