Pizza Making Class in Asolo, Italy
Author: Ava McCrary | Major: Information Systems | Semester: Summer 2023
My name is Ava McCrary and I studied abroad in Italy this summer with the CIMBA program. To begin, I chose this program because of the amount of time it offered. This program was only a month long, which was the perfect amount of time because it still allowed me to come home for the rest of summer and work my summer job. This program advanced my academic goals by allowing me to take two classes that I need before I graduate but take them in only four weeks instead of a whole semester. It also advanced my professional goals by sending me off to a new country with no family to rely on. It taught me how to make important decisions on my own and prepare me to start my future when I graduate college. Before studying abroad, I was the person who always depended on other people to help me make important decisions, and now that I have been home, I can already tell that I am much more independent. I took Intro to Marketing and Intro to Financial Management as my two classes. I was expecting these classes to be extremely hard since there was so much to learn in such a short time, but the teachers understand that we are on our own in a different country and do not assign any work on the weekends since that is when we can travel. They were very friendly and willing to help whenever a student needed it. These classes differ from those at the U of A because they moved a lot faster. Even though it was only a month long, we still managed to cover all that we would’ve in a normal semester because the school days were very long hours. Our class schedule was from 8 am to around 5 pm every day, even with just two classes, but it was only Monday through Thursday at noon. After class ended at noon on Thursday, we were free to leave to travel any place we wanted to.
The town we stayed in when we were doing classes was called Paderno Del Grappa, and it was a very small and quaint town about an hour from Venice, Italy. In this small town, the only places we had to go to was a pizza restaurant and a small hotel with a tiny restaurant inside it. The pizza place was called Al Sol and it had an amazing atmosphere and extremely friendly workers. Almost every student would go there at least twice a week to eat or drink. There was another town close by called Asolo, just a 45-minute bus ride away. This town was much bigger and more populated with many more options. Everywhere we went during the school days was so beautiful and covered with so much green from all the beautiful trees, plants, bushes, and flowers. Transportation was always super easy, given that CIMBA provided weekly buses to the towns nearby and occasionally had buses taking us to further towns away on the weekend, like Florence and Rome.
Advice I have for any other students wanting to study abroad in general is- DO IT! I was very hesitant at first, scared of being alone in another country that I had never been to, but just on the first day I knew this would be an experience of a lifetime. I have not only grown so much as a person, but I have also made new friends that I am so grateful for. Some of the girls I met while studying abroad go to the same college as me, but with all the students we have at the University of Arkansas, it’s impossible to meet absolutely everybody, but through this program, I met so many more girls at my school. Before I left to study abroad, I wish I knew not to get fooled by the cheaper prices, which only seem cheaper because the euro is cheaper than the dollar, so when the money exchanges over on your credit or debit card, it tends to be more than you were initially expecting. The first thing I did when I got home was fill my water bottle with ice. In Europe, especially Italy, ice is not popular to have in water. Personally, ice in my water is a necessity and the thing I missed the most.