YasminGhassanAbu Alhala, a fifth year student from the Industrial Engineering Department at An-Najah University, was selected by the IAESTE to conduct a practical training period at Herriot Watt University in the United Kingdom. Yasmin was one of a number of students from the Engineering Faculty who were selected by the IAESTE local office at An-Najah University for the offers received from the international IAESTE. Yasmin was the only student who won a practical training opportunity at a British institution.

During a two months period of practical training,Yasmin was involved in a project aimed at designing an optimization model for pre-construction Embodied Carbon Auditing in the Built Environment. In order to be able to design the model; an extensive literature review has been made by Yasmin on lots of areas including sustainability, green building, life cycle assessment, embodied carbon and energy. To enrich the training experience of Yasmin, she was required to participate at a number of seminars and meetings with the research group at Herriot Watt University who work on the project. A second aspect for Yasmin training was her involvement in the creation of a comprehensive database about the most energy efficient materials used in construction. The aim of this task was to build a bank of information that could be used when selecting materials with low level of emissions and economically consume energy and comparing these issues with the monetary issues (costs) to finally be able to design the model depending on certain criteria which was extracted from last studies and researches. Although the training period was not long enough for Yasmin to work with the research group tofinish the whole project, her inputs have been highly regarded by the research group as the project forthcoming journal paper will be publishedwith Yasmin being a Co-author. Yasmin said that she is so pleased and proud to be able to take part in writing academic journal paper before even finishing her bachelor degree.

In addition to the academic experience that Yasmin has gained, she has also got the chance to discover a lot of the Scottish attractions and life features in Edinburgh.