(514d) Students and Graduates Exchange Programmes in the Chemical Engineering Department of the University of Coimbra in Portugal

Undergraduate exchange programs have been active in Europe for quite some time and, as a consequence, the Portuguese university students have been profiting from those programs since long ago. In the Chemical Engineering Department of the University of Coimbra we have been engaged in those programmes, mainly with European universities, for at least 15 years. In this paper we will report that experience, giving notice of its importance to the education of our chemical engineering students, not only because it gives them access to chemical engineering fields not covered in our university, but mainly because it allows them an international experience, which we repute very important for their employability and future attitude in their profession as chemical engineers.

Furthermore, this exchange works both ways, with an increasing number of students from other European universities choosing to spend a semester or a full year in our department. So, in this paper we will also report the experience of receiving in our courses chemical engineering students from other European universities under the Socrates/Erasmus Program and, more recently, from Brazilian universities, as the result of a newly created exchange programme.

More recently, during the last five years, we have also been involved in another exchange program, funded also by the European Community, this time directed to graduates, in our case graduated chemical engineers: the Leonardo da Vinci Program. This program allows us to send our recent graduates, during the year after their graduation, to European companies or research institutes adhering to the program, and thus give to our graduates access to a first international professional experience. The advantages and assessment of our involvement in this program will also be discussed in this paper.

Additionally, and starting this school year, a new program, also under the Leonardo da Vinci funding scheme, has been launched. This time the program aims at supporting training experiences of undergraduate students, namely chemical engineering students, in European companies, for periods of two to three months, during the summer vacations. We are also institutionally engaged in that program though, so far, these training periods will be considered as extra-curricular work, which will, nevertheless, be included in their official diploma supplement, a document the university has to add to each graduate certificate describing his or her entire education course. The possibility of considering these international summer trainings as curricular work is being discussed.