Dr. Katherine D'Ambrosio, an undergraduate student in Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE), was awarded travel funds from the Joe S. Mundy Global Learning Experience Endowment for fall 2009. A senior at Georgia Tech, Katherine is pursuing a degree in the area of transportation. She utilized the Mundy funding to attend the annual European Transport Conference (ETC) held in the Netherlands from October 5-7, 2009.
During the three days spent at the conference she attended several seminars including "What Influences our Choices?", "Urban Freight", "Traffic Calming and Street Design" and "Traffic Assignment" each of which presented multiple papers on the topic. On the third day of the conference for the last two sessions, a technical visit to the new Hague RandstadRail was planned. The visit toured through a couple of the light rail vehicles and several stations including De Haag Centraal Station which is the largest terminal station in the Netherlands. "Having taken CEE 4610 - Multimodal Transport, it was one of the first times I was able to see what I had learned in class being applied in the real world".
Besides seminars and learning experiences at the conference, the Mundy Endowment was also awarded to support an international experience for which Katherine spent time neighboring city of the conference, Amsterdam. During the total six day visit in the Netherlands, she visited the Den Hartogh Ford Museum which is the largest private collection of Ford automobiles in the world and took a picture with the same model as the Ramblin Wreck.
Transportation students JP O'Har and Katherine D'Ambrosio at the Den Hartogh Ford Museum in Hillegom, Netherlands
Other activities included walking around the city, getting lost, while taking in the architecture and intricate transportation network on the road. "The food was probably one of my favorite things about Amsterdam because I ended up finding and trying a lot of food with ingredients that I wouldn't have thought to put together". While she wasn't brave enough for the fresh herring, french fries with mayonnaise is one of the other main attractions that you can find along most streets. Also, at The Pancake Bakery, which serves what can best be described as "cooked like an omelet with pancake batter instead of egg but is presented on a large plate like pizza, it was excellent".
"Overall, I had an excellent experience on the entire trip. The ETC was the first conference I attended and once I figured out where I was supposed to be at what times, I got to experience a wide variety of topics in an area that I find extremely interesting: transportation. The city experiences were also very educational and enjoyable; while this wasn't my first time traveling to Europe, this was my first experience traveling solo. In the month that I had between applying for the Endowment and attending the conference I was amazed that everything came together for me to have a successful and fun trip".