The CMU Portugal Program hosted a welcome event on Tuesday September 8th for students currently studying in Pittsburgh. Among the 22 PhD students, including 4 Affiliated and 18 Dual Degree students, 13 of them gathered for lunch and community building.
The CMU Portugal staff gave a brief presentation that included office locations on campus, semester highlights and tips for living in Pittsburgh. The attending students are hosted on five CMU departments; Computer Science (5), Electrical and Computer Engineering (2), Engineering and Public Policy (2), Human-Computer Interaction (1), Language Technologies (1) and Software and Societal Computing (2); as well as two Portuguese Universities; Instituto Superior Técnico (8) and Universidade do Porto (5).
After lunch the students participated in a bridge building challenge. As Pittsburgh is widely known as “the city of bridges”, with this theme in mind the students were challenged to build a bridge in 5 minutes using only notecards, paperclips and tape. The winning bridge can be found displayed in the CMU Portugal offices on campus.
Starting in October the Program is excited to welcome 19 visitors under the Visiting Students and Visiting Faculty and Researchers programs to CMU. The visitors will spend between 2 weeks to 2 months conducting research mentored by leading faculty and researchers at CMU. If you’re interested in learning more about our program, be sure to sign up for our newsletter News from the Fence.