Soaking Up the Culture While Doing Research in London

London is one of the world’s most iconic and storied cities. It’s also home to one of WPI’s oldest and most popular project centers.

Students have been doing Interactive Qualifying Projects there since 1974, though the project center wasn’t formally established until 1987. Since then, 1,762 WPI students have completed 521 IQPs in London, according to Dominic Golding, director of the project center since 2010.

Many students drawn to the London project centers (the city is now also one of six off-campus destinations where students can complete their Humanities and Arts requirement) have a passion for the arts and are eager to soak up all the theatre, literary history, and culture they can in their spare time.

During D-Term 2024, one team took their interest in the arts a step further, enjoying London’s cultural gems while advancing their research: “One of the most exciting parts of our IQP was that we visited over 20 local museums,” says Benjamin Antupit ’25, MS ’25. “We got to look at these museums from a curator’s perspective to understand how they tell stories—what lenses they use, through what mediums, through what technologies.”

He and teammates Natalie Carrington ’25, Connor Quinn ’25, and Sage Ugras ’25 visited all those museums as part of their IQP with the Brunel Museum, a small quirky institution off London’s well-trod tourist path, that celebrates the history of the Thames Tunnel, the world’s first to go beneath a navigable waterway. Completed in 1843, the tunnel was the brainchild of engineer Marc Brunel and his son, Isambard.

Tasked with developing an audio tour and collecting visitor data for the Brunel Museum, the team decided that to make informed recommendations, they first needed to learn about museum curation.

Golding, a teaching professor in the Department of Integrative and Global Studies who has a background in museum studies, offered some guidance and introductions.

“Dominic helped us make a connection that added a whole new dimension to our project,” Antupit says. “Instead of just visiting the National Portrait Gallery and walking around, we had the person who develops their audio take us on their audio tour and tell us all about what it means to make a great audio tour.”

After each museum visit, team members recorded their feedback in a customized Google form. Analyzing one another’s comments helped them see what worked well in other museums. Their notes also revealed a simple insight that not only informed their final recommendations to the Brunel staff but also helped them see human interactions in general in a new light.

“All four people in our project experience museums differently,” Ugras says. “I don’t really read any of the text. I like to look at the paintings or objects and I’ll listen to things, but reading is not my forte within a museum space. Connor liked to jump around and see the highlights. Benjamin was a lot more meticulous.”

Antupit nods and smiles. “Yeah, I read the whole thing. Why not? That’s what I thought the experience was for.”

Armed with qualitative and quantitative data from their museum visits and observations of Brunel patrons, the team approached their project sponsors about creating audio segments for a few artifacts rather than a full audio tour. That way, they figured, visitors wouldn’t be glued to their headsets and could interact with one another.

After so many decades of project work in London, WPI has gained a fantastic reputation among the many nonprofit and government organizations where students have done IQPs.

“Project sponsors in London are invariably blown away by how professional and dedicated our students are,” says Golding. “From long-term association and from word of mouth, people in London know that our students are committed, and they’re very committed to our students.”

About a decade ago, word of mouth even earned WPI the attention of a member of the House of Lords—and led to the creation of a new project center. Lord Richard Faulkner was impressed by WPI students’ work at the Science Museum, where he was a member of the board, and he approached Golding about doing some projects in his home city of Worcester, about 130 miles northwest of London.

While Ugras and Antupit never made it to Worcester, they did go to Bath—where the audio tour at the ancient Roman baths gave them ideas for their own project.

By the end of their time in London, the team created four audio stops for the Brunel Museum. Each segment incorporates music popular in Victorian England and features a member of the museum staff explaining the significance behind one aspect of the collection. The team also shared with Brunel staff data showing how visitors travel through the space and interact with the exhibits, information that can inform future curatorial decisions.

And remember all those museums the team visited? They presented their project sponsors with “a survey of their local peers,” Antupit says, likening the feedback to a collection “of how people craft stories and what makes those stories meaningful.”

A fitting element for a project in a city as storied as London.