The Pitt plus three trip to Germany was an amazing experience and I am grateful to have taken part in it.  This trip was a great opportunity to meet new people, learn more about a different culture as well as enhance my knowledge of the automotive industry.  Because the trip was only two weeks long,…

              Today was my last full day in Germany and I took full advantage of it.  I started the day by waking up early and going out to breakfast at local restaurant before catching a train with some friends to go to Munich.  We even had one of the German students join us on our…

              Today is the last day of anything scheduled on our trip to Germany.  Our final trip as a class was to Ulm, a small Bavarian city.  The main attraction of the day was the climb to the top of the Munster.  This is the tallest Christian building in the world, and like most old…

Today was a relatively short day content wise, but it felt like one of the longest.  We had nothing scheduled for the day except for our final company presentations at 5.  Luckily this meant we got to sleep in.  My group and I had done most of our preparation for the presentation earlier in the…

              Today is the day that I have been looking forward to the most on this trip.  Today we got to visit Neuschwanstein Castle.  The castle was built by the Bavarian king, King Ludwig the II.  The castle itself is right at the foot of the Alps on the German Austrian border.  It was built…

Today we went on our fifth and final company tour.  It was a tour of BMW’s factory in Munich. This trip was very interesting.  BMW’s main building stood high in the skyline and was very recognizable.  Their entire factory looked very nice and modern.  We went straight to BMW Welt.  This was a building set…

Today we went to one of the concentration camps in Germany, Dachau.  I went in knowing a little about World War II and concentration camps in general, but nothing about this site specifically, so I didn’t know what to expect.  Driving into the concentration camp was a strange experience.  I had imagined it being in…

Today was our trip to Munich.  This was especially interesting to me because I had learned so much about the city when I had taken German in high school.  The city was much larger than I had expected.  It seemed especially large after spending the last couple of days in Augsburg, a much smaller city….

Today we went on a tour of our fourth company, SGL.  They are a company that focuses primarily on providing carbon components to the auto industry.  They started the tour out with an information session like many of the other companies had.  I found this session more interesting than the others because SGL had recently…

              Today we got to sleep in.  It was much needed because I was still feeling some jet lag from the plane ride over.  The morning was also nice because we did not have to eat the hotels breakfast.  Instead we got on a coach bus and headed to a breakfast restaurant in the Bavarian…

Today we toured Hirschvogel.  This was the second of our five company visits for the trip.  This was an interesting company to see.  They focus specifically on making small forged metal parts for automobiles. The plant we visited had many large machines that ran most of the operations.  I thought it was very interesting to…

            Today we went and toured Faurecia. This was the first of many for our company tours.  The plant we went to specifically was one of their exhaust system manufacturing plants.  Our day started out with a discussion with a few of the employees.  I enjoyed this part because we got to see a lot…

              Today we had our first chance to interact with the German students that we were paired with.  The company that I am studying while here is Faurecia.  The group that I am working with was comprised of four students from the University of Pittsburgh and three students from Germany.  The German students were very…

Today we arrived in Germany.  Our flight landed at roughly 8 am German time.  We had left the dorms at 3 am the morning before so we were all still very tired, but there was no time to rest.  We still had a full day ahead of us.  After arriving at the hotel, we had…

Hello! My name is Matthew Spinello. I’m in the Swanson School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh.  My intended major is mechanical engineering.  I was born and raised in York, Pennsylvania.  I enjoy sports, watching tv and hanging out with friends.  Going into college I knew I wanted to take advantage of any study…