My trip to Japan was sponsored by the David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, of which I am an Alum.

The Practice School, as we like to call it, is an intensive 15-18 month graduate degree program which combines the rigorous graduate curriculum in Chemical Engineering at MIT, with three to four one-month projects in host companies around the world. In my case, I attended a station in sponsored by GE Plastics, in Mt. Vernon, Indiana, and another sponsored by then Rhone-Poulenc, in Lyon, France.

A group of six to ten students is divided into teams of two or three, each with a single team "leader." Each team is assigned a one-month project, for which they will work under the close supervision of an MIT faculty member (the Station Director or Assistant Station Director) and project sponsors from the host company.

The format of each one-month project focuses on intense technical work, combined with extensive reporting and write-up. Each team is required to deliver three formal talks and two reports, all in the span of four weeks and all while producing the results which will form these results.

At MIT, close to 50% of the PhD students elect to obtain an MSCeP degree en route to their final degree. Prior to the Practice School I had no relevant engineering experience to speak of (I worked on undergraduate research projects). During interviews by the end of my PhD, all I ever talked about was my Practice School experience. I hope that these further two months spent in Japan and working with Practice School students will help me gain insight and experience which I could then transfer to my students at the University of Puerto Rico.

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