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View from the Hill
Experiential Education at UNH: When the World is Your Classroom

If a student wants a broad education but also wants a job waiting after college, which is better: Book learning or experience?

The answer: Both.

The University of New Haven is taking the classroom out of the building ,and the students into the field. Understanding full well what the New England philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was thinking when he said, "Skill to do, comes of doing,"

UNH students are availing themselves of internships, research opportunities, and community service that bring them into contact with scientists, businesspeople, professional engineers, authors and more .Experience combined with education-aka experiential education-is moving UNH students into the future equipped to succeed. Experiential education also figures prominently in the University's Strategic Direction, a master plan for the future.

"Classroom learning combined with internships, research opportunities and many of the other hands-on experiences that UNH offers its students create highly employable graduates," points out President Steven H. Kaplan.

UNH's Concrete Canoe Club Races to Make a Concrete Canoe

In preparation for a national competition, students from UNH's Concrete Canoe Club are in the midst of building a canoe that uses all the traditional components - carefully drawn-up plans, mechanical engineering skills, wood - but with one small addition: concrete. The challenge is enough to sink anyone's boat, but the rewards are plentiful. The students learn to work as a team, manage a budget, cope with a tight schedule, design, analyze, solve and more.

One afternoon recently, four civil engineering students, Luke Clunan'10, Chris Stankus '09, Matt Burke '09 and Jesse McIntyre '09, worked on the bones of the canoe on the lower level of Buckman Hall. "It will float," said Stankus.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, boat builders have been using concrete in floating vessels since 1848. The first documented case was that year, when Joseph Louis Lambot began building concrete boats for use on his estate in France. Some student chapters of the ASCEdate their intramural concrete canoe races to the 1960s. The University of Illinois-Urbana and the University of California-Berkeley both claim they held the first ASCE regional competitions in the early 1970s. Since then, students have advanced the art and science of the concrete canoe to new heights of hydrodynamic design.

For the first time since the race's inception, the National Concrete Canoe Competition will be held outside the geographic United States, in Montreal from June 19 through June 21. (Remember your passports!)