This May, electrical engineering students from the University of Alabama in the USA travelled to Brno for the opportunity to work on research in state-of-the-art laboratories. After three months, they are now saying goodbye to Brno, but in a year's time, another group will be coming to the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication of the Brno University of Technology.

Twenty-one-year-old John Slay travelled to Europe to conduct research thanks to a project by the US National Science Foundation: „I have had great experience with my mentors, they have been more than willing to help me with my project and I have learned a lot. I decided to pursue research in electrical engineering and this experience was acutallly a big decision factor in that."

Thanks to the project, the students got the opportunity to work on research much earlier than their peers; in the Czech Republic, students tend to encounter individually led research only in their doctoral studies. In this case, each of the five students was assigned a mentor with whom they consulted weekly. The young scientists worked, for example, on the determination of food ripeness based on impedance, i.e. electrical resistance.

"It has been a very different experience from what we have experienced as far as research in US. This has been very much like we trust you, you go do your own thing, and that is nice," praises twenty-two-year-old Stormy Gale of the three-month internship.

The University of Alabama is the largest and oldest public university in Alabama, and has very high ratings in research. It is attended by nearly 40,000 students who can choose from engineering, law, art and more.