Last year Anthony DiNardi, a twenty-one-year-old mechanical engineering student at Clemson University, had a difficult decision to make. 'I had a really interesting internship lined up for the spring, when I was invited to an information session about studying abroad in Hamburg, Germany. Right from my freshman year I had wanted to study abroad. My sister had done it and loved it. But somehow I kept thinking I’ve got time and then never really got round to looking into it properly,' he admits. 'But when I heard about the HAW Hamburg programme I knew that my plans were going to change. It was going to give me the opportunity to study something that I was passionate about and that made it all the more enticing.'
Anthony has already completed two summer internships during his studies at Clemson and it was during his second internship at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems that he discovered a passion for the aviation industry. He worked in systems engineering, where he learned how important it is to keep the big picture in mind when you are an engineer. 'It is easy to get tunnel vision when you are working on a specific part of an aircraft,' he explains of his experience. 'As a systems engineer you always consider the product or the system as a whole. We designed new products with ideas coming from a top-down approach and based on customer needs. I also learned about the importance of communication and how to interact with different customers. And I just really enjoyed working in aircraft systems.'
