Outside Salzburg, at Wolfgangsee lake.
Author: Patrick Hodskins | Major: Marketing, SEVI | Semester: Summer 2023
This summer I spent about a month in Italy studying at CIMBA and a couple extra weeks afterwards traveling around 3 more countries. It was one of the best summers of my life and I will always remember this experience. I chose the CIMBA program because I knew some of the people that had done it the summer before, but also had class with Kim Petrone where she talked about it and I actually grew up with her son which gave me some insight and talking to her about it thoroughly. I was looking for a program that could help me advance my academic goals and take classes that actually counted towards my majors. Here I was able to take two upper level marketing classes that furthered my education. It also helps my professional goals because I would be very interested in moving abroad after college and working from Europe of somewhere for a little bit, and this gave me a lot of insight toward what that may be like.
One of the classes I took was Storytelling in Marketing with Heather Nelson. I found this class very interesting. It took a deep dive of storytelling as a sole thing to begin with. Talking about how storytelling is one of the key factors in civilization and as we evolved storytelling was with us the whole time. Talking about gossip and campfire stories that were used by ancient societies. She made sure that we knew how old and how important storytelling is. We also talked a lot about the brain and how we as people are wired to curious and to love cause and effect which play heavily into a story. Then we talked about the building blocks of a story and what makes them up and how we can relate this to business and went through many businesses showing their story brand framework.
The other class that I took was International Marketing with Swinder Janda. He was a really nice man and good teacher with a cool outlook on life. In his class we spoke of the difference when marketing international and how careful you have to be of cultural differences and translation differences. This can be detrimental to your brand because you may think you can just do the same thing wherever and it will work the same but that is not the case. Other cultures may have a different way of life that they wouldn’t like it the same way and may even find in offensive if you do it that way. These classes were really interesting and furthered my education in Marketing for sure. They were different from U of A classes in the way of field trips where we got to see factories or hear from business owners in the area. There were also guest speakers that came in and had a lot of knowledge which I liked.
Overall, the school experience at CIMBA was really great, I learned a lot and had an amazing time. One of my favorite experiences was in Pula, Croatia over a weekend. We went here with some friends and found an Airbnb to stay in. As soon as we got there everyone was super pleasant and nice, the owner of our Airbnb met us and gave us a bunch of tips and was a really nice lady. The first day we rented bikes and rode around the town and to multiple different beaches. Here we were able to listen to the music that the locals around us played as we relaxed and soaked in the sun. We were able to walk around town and through the markets that they had and talk to locals and different vendors. The next day we took out a boat and the captain took us around to different spots where some of the locals were where we got to cliff jump, swim, and snorkel. This was a beautiful area that I had not expected to go to or be as beautiful as it was. The people were amazing, and the architecture had ruins of a roman coliseum and also a mix of Croatian old buildings. But some of the other areas I really liked were in Austria where we went to Innsbruck and Salzburg.
If I were to give some advice to students curious about study abroad, first I would say Do It. It is an experience that you would be blessed to have and something you will remember forever. I would also recommend to stay longer on your own as we did because we got some much for time just to travel and were able to see so much more.