Author: Matthew Teague | Major: Mechanical Engineering | Semester: Summer 2025

Driving a Porsche 718 Boxter during a Driver’s Safety Training Course

Over the past year, I have had the amazing opportunity to study abroad in Germany through the International Engineering Program (IEP), where students earn a Dual Degree in Engineering and German in five years. In the fourth year of the IEP, students spend a semester at a German university and then apply directly to German companies for an internship during the second semester. I had been interested in studying abroad in Germany mainly due to some of the family I have who live there. I visited them once with my parents when I was much younger, but because I didn’t speak any German, I couldn’t connect with them in the way I wanted. Beyond my family, Germany is home to some of the most impressive and prestigious car manufacturers, and as a Mechanical Engineering major, I knew that what the IEP offered was the best possible route for me to pursue for both my personal and professional goals.

From September of last year until February of this year, I was a student at Technische Universität Darmstadt and throughout the semester took seven of their courses. Some related specifically to Mechanical Engineering while others aimed at furthering my German skills in the areas of speaking and comprehension. Based on my level of German when I first entered the country, I knew I was not prepared for an engineering class that was taught completely in German. However, TU Darmstadt does not have an exceedingly high number of Mechanical Engineering courses that are taught in English, so I found myself enrolled in several Masters level courses that would end up being among the most difficult classes I have taken since I began my university path.

My experience studying abroad at TU Darmstadt was exceedingly difficult from being on campus at the University of Arkansas. In comparison, there were far less resources available to students for most kinds of assistance. Additionally, the process of registering for classes has given me some much-needed perspective on how good we all have it at the U of A when it comes to our system for class registration. At no point did I know which classes I should be taking, nor which ones I shouldn’t have even been able to due to their prerequisites. Each registration felt like a shot in the dark, and the advice from students who had done the same program before me made it sound like this was in fact the standard way things operate at German universities.

Each class consisted of either a written or oral exam that made up your entire grade. The kind of exam it would be was determined by the professor, although sometimes not announced until halfway through the semester. In nearly all classes, attendance was not technically mandatory, but with such a difficult grading method (compared to what I am used to in America), I cannot imagine that a student who missed out on most lectures would be able to come close to a passing grade in any class. This was also my first experience with a proper oral exam making up the final grade, which was exceedingly difficult for me. I usually consider myself to be a good test-taker, but after this experience, I now think that that only applies to written exams. To prepare for these exams, I had to teach myself a completely different method of studying, with no intermediate tests or quizzes to encourage me or to check my progress along the way. Despite these challenging circumstances, I believe that studying abroad has helped me to quickly adapt to new situations in a way that few other things could.

While the first half of my study abroad experience was often stressful and overwhelming, the second half will be the part that I will look back on very fondly for the rest of my life. For five months, from the beginning of March to the end of July, I had the unbelievable opportunity to work at an internship with Porsche, in the development-specific location of Weissach. Even after five months of working at Porsche, it still almost doesn’t feel real to me that I was able to work there. Every day when I walked into work, I would walk past cars that collectively were worth at least tens of millions of dollars. Most of them were either the result of years of hard work from dedicated and passionate employees, or development vehicles that were driven around the racetrack right outside of my office, constantly being tested, calibrated and tweaked until the next project was tasked to them.

Working at Porsche as an intern has been an amazing, rewarding experience. In my experience, interns at Porsche were treated as full employees and were therefore tasked with project work that integrated right into the rest of the work being done by full-time employees. I had the opportunity to edit and optimize a program file from a colleague that calculated the length of a certain component given hundreds of input variables. Because of my background working with a semiconductor manufacturer in America, I was also tasked with creating my own subsection of a simulation app that focused on electrical inverters and was able implement my previous knowledge to create a simulation of what the power modules should look like depending on the input requirements on each inverter. Finally, I was given a CAD project that involved designing and implementing a new braking feature on an existing model to be presented as a potential feature used in development.

Overall, studying abroad allowed me to adapt to completely new environments, to be immersed in a different culture, and to vastly improve my ability to speak and understand German. Without it, I would not have had the opportunity to secure an internship with one of the most renowned car manufacturers, nor the opportunity to see and be able to speak with my German family. It has been an extremely rewarding experience, and it will be something that I will be glad that I did for the rest of my life.