Detroit to Tokyo · June 2026
From Wayne State to Japan: a mechanical engineering student's perspective on manufacturing, global supply chains, and life beyond the classroom. Made possible in part by the Gilman Scholarship. Documented so the next student can take the first step.
An illustrated globe connecting Detroit, Michigan and Tokyo, Japan. The arc is a visual connection, not a flight itinerary. Smaller markers show the countries the author is working toward next, which are listed in full further down this page.
Drag to explore · Hover over a blue marker
Japan · June 2026
Factory floors. Shared classrooms. Conversations over dinner. An education shaped by the people and places between each stop.
Explore the Japan journal
Engineering & global supply chains
A product connects design decisions to materials, production processes, suppliers, and customers. Visiting Yamaha, KEYLEX, DELTA, and Mazda brought those relationships into view.
Explore the industrial perspective
Learning across cultures
Working through a business case with Japanese students made collaboration an everyday practice: listening carefully, explaining a position, and finding a way forward together.
Inside the classroom exchange
Life with classmates
Shared meals, train journeys, rainy walks, and evenings in unfamiliar cities made the program personal. The academic experience and the experience of living abroad developed together.
Meet the experience beyond classWhy this exists
International experience belongs in an engineering education. For students managing a limited budget, the challenge is understanding how to pay for it. Pell to Planet makes that process visible through my own experience.
Program fees, travel, and tuition need to be considered together. Scholarships and financial aid have different conditions and payment schedules. This guide separates those pieces so students can prepare informed questions for their advisors.
My faculty-led program connected industrial visits with cultural immersion and learning alongside Japanese students. This project shares both the value of that experience and the financial planning behind it.
Everything here carries a source. Costs come from my own statements and receipts, awards from my award letters, and rules from the official pages, each with the date I checked it. Where I do not know a number, it says so instead of guessing.
The trip cost roughly $8,000 all in. Awards and aid covered most of it. The full breakdown →
June 20 · Kyoto
Our class walked the Fushimi Inari path in the rain. In Osaka, we had worked through a business case with Japanese students. At Yamaha, we observed how careful manufacturing decisions shaped an instrument. Each place added context to the next.
What going with your school looks like
A faculty-led program provides an academic itinerary and a group to share it with. Between site visits and coursework, there is room to explore, adapt, and build friendships in unfamiliar places.
What's inside
Who this is for
I wrote it with Wayne State engineering and business students in mind, because that is who I am and those are the offices I can name. But the method — take the budget apart, separate what follows the trip from what follows the term, ask for the review, line up the dates — works at any US university.
Start with my numbers to see what a real short program costs, then the calculator to work out yours.
There is a page built for you, with a summary you can forward and a printable handout.
Every figure, rule and date on this site is listed with its source on the sources page.
Europe
Central Asia
Gulf
East Asia
If you fund, host or advise international students, I would like to hear from you. My background is mechanical engineering and global supply chain management, and what I want next is to study how electrified, automated manufacturing actually works somewhere it is being built.
Your turn
The calculator asks for the same handful of lines I had to chase down, then shows you the gap and when it falls due. Print it and bring it to Financial Aid.
