Learning about global sustainable energy practices via lectures is one thing. Visiting Europe to see sustainable energy approaches firsthand is another. Students from the colleges of Arts and Architecture, Earth and Mineral Sciences, and Engineering got to do both as a part of a unique interdisciplinary course, "Living with Sustainable Energy in a Global Society," this spring.

On a rainy spring morning in Cynwyd, Wales, a group of Penn State students and faculty gather in the local youth hostel, a coal fire burning in the small stove, to recount the stops on their energy tour of Iceland and the United Kingdom. Lara Owens, an undergraduate studying geosciences, begins by describing Icelandic hydroelectric and geothermal power plants that produce enough energy for the small nation, and the country's lone hydrogen-powered car—the first in a fleet, the government hopes—with its own fueling station.

A curriculum that includes touring windmill farms in the UK? How about scaling New Zealand's Southern Alps, scuba diving in the Florida Keys, or camping along the Colorado River?

That's all in a day's work for students involved in the interdisciplinary courses sponsored by the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences' Center for Advanced Undergraduate Study and Experience (CAUSE).

Stanlow, England—While thundering along the highways in our diesel-powered van, I've been noticing fields of bright yellow-flowered plants, waving in the wind and glowing during those rare moments the sun comes out.

This May sixteen Penn State undergraduates and three faculty members spent two weeks traveling through Iceland and the United Kingdom. They stayed in youth hostels, ate at truckstops, rode for hours in large diesel-powered vans, and suffered through days and days of bone-chilling rain. Their mission: to chart the West's progress from 18th-century rural economy to the post-industrial economy of the 21st century, focusing on the significant role that energy resources have played in that transformation.

It's not an easy trek to Harlock Hill's wind farm: You have to drive several miles northwest of Ulverston on England's notorious back roads, barely wide enough for a bicycle. The roads are lined by four-foot stone walls, and surrounded by the vivid green foliage only possible in this country where it has rained every day for the last week and a half.

"Twenty of us were together"—15 undergraduates, two instructors, and three graduate students to help with the driving—"for 24 hours a day, for two weeks," says student Kate Darby. "By 7 am, we had to be out and ready to go for a long day."

The CAUSE seminar allowed undergraduate Kristy Fruit to take her liberal arts education and "smash it together with the technical stuff," she says.