What is EuroTech?

Hello Everyone! For those of you who haven’t heard of or are curious about what Eurotech is, you have come to the right spot! Eurotech is a three-credit course offered through Syracuse University’s iSchool, but open to all majors. This course is comprised of both an on-campus class as well as a three-week trip to ten different cities all across Europe. The trip portion of the class has many parts which included multiple site visits to help us students understand how companies and organizations use data to make business decisions as well as network with potentially future employers. The main emphasis of the class is to highlight how IT plays a part on the workplace and the culture within many globally known companies. Aside from the site visits we do many cultural group visits to places like the Roman Colosseum, Dachau concentration camp, Eiffel Tower, Buckingham Palace, and more.

The Eurotech trip is open to anyone within Syracuse University, meaning anyone from any major is welcome to partake. Due to this we had such a diverse range of students including many Whitman, Maxwell, and iSchoolers. Due to the this we were able to have much deeper conversations at many of the site visits because we had many different perspectives.

In order to take this course and go on the trip I had to apply through the university’s study abroad portal and fill out an application about why I wanted to go and why I thought I would be a good fit. This application process is nothing to be nervous about as long as you do it early since there is only about 30 spots open and the trip is very popular. Once accepted to the trip, I was then allowed to sign up for the one semester course in the spring, which only meets five times. The class portion is heavily presentation based, as we would be divided into new groups for every class and required to do a short presentation on either a certain city or company, The purpose of these presentations was to help us become familiar with the different cities and company’s we would be visiting as well as helping us get acquainted with the other students on the trip. The fifth and final class was a two-hour pre-trip orientation, where we all were told the specific details of the trip and how to prepare for all the travels we would be doing!