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Willkommen to the 2025 Lafayette College Bonn Study Abroad Blogging Site.

Throughout the Spring 2025 Semester (Jan. 8 through May 2), 25 students from across Lafayette College’s engineering program will participate in a study abroad program in Bonn, Germany.  Students will be enrolled in several courses at Karlshochschule International University.  For our Lafyette-sponsored course, students and I will work together to study how various cities’ structural frameworks (i.e., infrastructure systems) function safely and meet the needs of their residents and workers.  In addition to studying the city and infrastructure of Bonn, we will also have the opportunity to travel to and study the cities of Cologne, Duisburg, Wolfsburg, Trier, and Belin in Germany, as well as Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Copenhagen, Denmark.  Students will be expected to blog about what they learn and experience throughout the semester.

We want to invite you to participate in our experience by helping us develop questions as we plan to speak with city officials, residents, and workers about the infrastructure systems that are key to a city’s operation, the interactions between those systems, and the impacts those systems have on residents and workers.  We are open to taking suggestions on what general observations we might want to consider as we travel to our many locations.  We are also interested in enriching our understanding of culture, history, and how people live their daily lives.

Please consider helping us enhance our experience throughout the spring semester with your questions, comments, and feedback. 

The course syllabus can be found at the following link: CE 181: Cities: An introduction to the civil engineering systems that make cities work.

Danke,
Professor Arthur D. Kney, PE, BCEE