The Middle European Planning Seminar (MEPS) is a one-week urban planning workshop designed to shape engineering perspectives. It was launched in 1990 in the form of a collaboration between Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic.
It was in 2015 that the Department of Civil Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Debrecen (UD) established the so-called MEPS Workshop, the objective of which was to enable students to actively participate in this event and gain experience while working in an international team.
The eight students from the MEPS Workshop of UD (István Baráth, Zoltán Hasznosi, Barbara Kókai, Péter Lukács, Viktor Nagy, Máté Pásztor, Marcell Tóth and Csaba Vertetics) spent several months preparing for the 36th urban planning workshop held in Poděbrady, Czech Republic. During the competitive program, they sought solutions to the transportation and urban planning challenges facing a small town in cooperation with students from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, the Vienna University of Technology and the host institution, the Czech Technical University in Prague.
Imre Kovács, the head of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Debrecen, considered the seminars an excellent opportunity for the students to get to know one another and to learn about and explore the different educational practices of the universities as well as the varying standards of the participating countries. For the MEPS competitions, students formed internationally mixed teams. The organizers gave tasks to each of the groups, which were composed of Hungarian, Czech and Austrian students, to solve a unique problem related to transportation in a given city, while the students were assisted in their work by a team of instructors from universities in the three countries. The completed plans then had to be presented to the representatives of the host city.
During the course of the program, the participants were able to put their engineering knowledge to the test in an international setting and could gain insight into the unique educational methods and standards of countries other than their own.
- During the week spent at the designing workshop, our students came up with an excellent performance, demonstrating their knowledge and skills across six different project components. Their instructor who prepared them as the head of the MEPS Workshop was our department engineer colleague, Ádám Ungvárai. We were proud to note that Roman Schulz, the mayor of Poděbrady, appreciated the high quality of the teams’ performance- said Head of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Debrecen Imre Kovács,.
We are looking forward to next year’s Middle European Planning Seminar, which will be hosted by the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Debrecen.
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