URI’s International Engineering Program is crossing borders and opening minds.

Alissa McKechnie spent last summer designing the latest Nerf Blaster at Hasbro’s headquarters in Pawtucket, R.I. In the coming months, she will witness the rollout of the design at the company’s Hong Kong manufacturing plant.

“It’s kind of crazy how it can start in one place and end in another and it gets shipped right back to the U.S.,” says McKechnie, a mechanical engineering student.

McKechnie, 22, arrived in Hangzhou, China, in August with four other students from the college’s International Engineering Program and two students from URI’s College of Business Administration. The aspiring engineers will spend the next six months at Zhejiang University, followed by a semester working at an international company.

The group is the largest contingent of IEP students to land in China since the program launched a Chinese offering three years ago. Since then demand has steadily grown in the Chinese program as well as the French, German and Spanish offerings. Today, close to 300 students participate and are on track to earn both a bachelor’s in engineering and in a foreign language.

“Alissa shows how our award-winning program trains students as global engineers,” IEP Executive Director Sigrid Berka says. “With their fusion of engineering and linguistic skills, they become innovators with exciting careers, bridging effortlessly between different hemispheres and engineering cultures.”

McKechnie expects that global knowledge to prove crucial as she prepares for life after URI. She knows from her time at Hasbro that the company craves engineers with multilingual skills and global experience.

She will also come armed with intimate familiarity of Hasbro’s Chinese operations, something few Hasbro employees can claim. Her knowledge will include the technical – the schematics and the machinery – as well as the cultural – noodles and spinach pancakes for breakfast. And there will be little doubt about her foreign language skills: her eight courses at Zhejiang University are all taught in Chinese.

“It’s such an intense and new experience you can’t pass it up,” she says