Thursday and Friday I was in Monterrey, Mexico to check out the opportunities for our students to study, work, or participate in community projects there through our relationship with Tec de Monterrey. Georgia Tech has recently created the International Plan option for undergraduate students. Students that opt for the IP will be required to work, study, or do research abroad for at least 26 weeks over no more than two separate visits in the same linguistic region. The Plan is new, but many students, especially INTA majors, are expected to opt for the IP designation and will need opportunities to go abroad.
Though I was in Monterrey for less than 24 hours total, the short visit made me homesick for Mexico. Walking around the center for an hour Thursday night, I felt a strong pull to be back in Mexico. It’s likely that I (maybe in coordination with some Spanish faculty) will be developing a study abroad program there soon.

View from campus building.

View of campus, where wild animals roam (literally).
Monterrey Tec is such a nice, new, modern, U.S-style campus that you could easily forget you’re in Mexico. The entire campus is wireless, and an entire classroom building has every room wired for video conferencing. In addition, the bathrooms have signs asking you to put your toilet paper in the toilet, and there are no trash bins in the stalls for toilet paper.


For those that have traveled in Mexico, you’ll appreciate this difference. Often, public (e.g., restaurant, hotel) bathrooms will ask that you not throw paper in the toilet and instead expect you to throw paper in a trash bin in the stall. A waste engineer that I met once explained that Mexicans often throw their paper in the trash rather than toilet for a couple of reasons. Often the water pressure is weak and only created by keeping a water tank on top of the house or building. This means that the pressure isn’t strong enough to flush paper well without clogging the system. Also, she said that since most waste ended up in local rivers, people didn’t throw paper so that paper wouldn’t float down the river with the waste. Of course, this is only one woman’s explanation, but since she was a waste engineer who studied “las aguas negras” outside of Mexico City, I’d tend to believe her. In either case, the bathrooms at Monterrey Tec are just one more reflection of how modern and North American the campus is.