Here is the story of how I ended up in Italy for a year

I wish I could say that this is a dramatic story of some deep desire to escape cultural confines or find myself in a different country. It isn’t though.

This story is actually quite boring, but it seemed like a good way to get the ball rolling. I’ve been to Italy once before in my life. “The Europe Trip,” as we called it, was offered once a year to upperclassmen at my high school in Rochester, NY. Although the trip was only 10 days, I had a fantastic time.

Fast-forward 6 months. During orientation, it just so happened that I registered for classes with the help of a study-abroad adviser named Lewis Fortner. Anyone who’s interacted with Lewis before knows how enthusiastic (almost crazy) he is about study-abroad. I told him that I was debating taking Italian or French. Without much further discussion, he simply said that he was putting me in Italian and that I would love it. He added, “Maybe we’ll even send you to Pisa in the spring.” I thought this was a joke or reference that I wasn’t getting. Nope.

Of course he was right. I loved learning Italian. My whole class was psyched about it too, and a few of us revived CIAO, a campus group devoted to the appreciation of Italian language and culture. Sometime that fall, that Pisa reference came back to haunt me. In class we learned about an opportunity to study/live in Pisa for spring quarter with a host family. A host family. How cool is that? It seemed crazy to leave Chicago (which I loved) for Italy during my first year, but this chance was also way too good to pass up. I applied during the Christmas break.

Only myself and one or two other people applied to the Pisa program. Study-abroad said they would only run the program with at least 5 or 6 students, so in February we learned that the program had been cancelled. I was disappointed, but not overly so, as I’d already caught wind of upcoming opportunities to study in Italy. And in retrospect, I’m really glad I stuck around for spring quarter, what with Scav and the warmer weather.  

Fast-forward again to Christmas break, 2^nd year. I decided to apply for two more study-abroad programs in Italy. The first was the UChicago standard: the one-quarter Civilization program in Rome. The second was called the BCSP, or the Bologna Consortial Studies Program. This one would last for an academic year: roughly speaking, September to June. I applied, and on February 15^th I found out I was accepted. Hooray, life-changing moment, etc etc.

So that, in a nutshell, is the incredibly uninteresting story of how I became so fixated on going to Italy. Hopefully this blog gets better as time goes on…I guess we’ll see!  

 (A picture from the first time I went to Italy, February 2010)