UTN Buenos Aires welcomed a Polish student as part of the IASTE Program

Her name is Karolina Caban, she lives in northeastern Poland and studies at the West Pomeranian University of Technology, Szczecin, in the School of Chemical Engineering, majoring in Nanotechnology. She has been in Buenos Aires for the last two months and she will be soon returning to Poland in order to complete the last semester before graduating. “In my degree program, in the senior year, we are required to go on an exchange for six weeks, -she explained-. I enjoy traveling and, last year, while on a trip, I met a lot of people from South America and I decided to come here because I liked your culture and traditions very much. Then I thought it was a chance to combine traveling and studying.”

This is the first student visiting the School of Engineering as part of the international program  created by IASTE (International Association for the Exchange of Students for Technical Experience), locally coordinated by the Argentine Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation. She mainly carried out her work in the Research and Development Laboratory (RDL), which belongs to the Chemical Engineering Department, where she worked with Marisa Sierra (Head of the Laboratory), and with Dr. Ulises Gilabert in the Mining and Geological Survey of Argentina (in Spanish, SegemAR).

“We started to work on corrosion-resistant coatings with Aluminum 5052 alloy used as substrate; -Sierra stated-. These coatings were prepared with a method known as Sol-gel and the proposal was to compare the same procedure while varying the number of layers applied, the dip-coating process speeds, and the drying and thermal treatment stages. Then, we performed potentiodynamic tests on them to evaluate their corrosion response. In turn, Dr. Gilabert proposed developing a Bio-glass at the SEGEMAR and there we made some Bio-glasses with changes in their composition and performed various tests on them, such as SEM, DTA and high temperature microscopy. Since she is interested in medicine and healthcare, Ulises looked for a task related to bio-glasses and glass ceramics, which is what we are working on, but applied to health,” she explained.

Caban stated that for her the exchange “was a very good experience. At first it was difficult because everybody here speaks Spanish and I couldn’t socialize in English on the street; I frequently got lost and thought of going back to my country. But then I made many friends, among them Marisa, who helped me a lot, she is a great person. I also met other European people who were traveling. I visited Puerto Iguazú and Salta, and after this week, which is my last one in Argentina, I will travel to Uruguay.”

Sierra said: “For me it was a new experience. I have experience with scholarship holders, but she is the first student coming for this kind of scholarship. It was a very beautiful experience because she is a very nice person. She is very kind, always open to my suggestions. We spent days just sanding and polishing pieces, which is boring but necessary, and she was always willing to work on everything. In this task I had the collaboration of Eng. María del Carmen Gutiérrez, Head of the Chemical Engineering Department.”