Studying abroad means gaining insights about yourself as well as about other cultures, two Oregon State University design seniors said after spending fall term 2014 in Florence, Italy.
“I learned I was more independent than I thought,” said Allison Scallon, an apparel design and merchandising management major who studied at Accademia Italiana, an international fine arts university.
Scallon was one of nine OSU students at AI last fall, a group that also included apparel design major Haley Lillybridge.
“Don’t be the thing that limits you from doing what you want,” Lillybridge said. “There are plenty of other limitations – don’t let yourself be one of them. Get yourself out of your comfort zone.”
Lillybridge and Scallon were among seven students who took part in a panel discussion in January aimed at encouraging others to study abroad. The panel also included Aaron LaVigne, who studied in Denmark; Cristina Juarez-Hernandez (Thailand); Elyse Hathaway (Germany); Fiona Bai (Spain); Arseniy Goldberg (Czech Republic) and Phung Mach (South Korea).
For Lillybridge, Accademia Italia fulfilled a five-year-old aspiration that originated with an 11-day tour to Switzerland, Italy and France that she took while a junior in high school in Bremerton, Wash.
“It was just a quick view of everything, and Florence was my favorite city,” she said. “I wanted to come back; I always had that goal to live abroad.”
She took five courses in Italy – history of 20th century fashion, history of Tuscany, advanced Italian, graphic design, and screen printing – and visited 11 countries.
“I’m a cold-weather person, so I went north and west,” said Lillybridge, who’s the president of the OSU snowboarding club, C.ORE Freeride, and aspires to a career in the technical design of winter outerwear.
Scallon’s interests, meanwhile, lie in surfwear product development – she’s from Burbank, Calif. – and she also had five classes in Florence: photographing Florence, fashion illustration, Italian, collections, and history of fashion.
Her photography class included stops at places such as the home of Michelangelo.
“We had a museum pass that allowed us to go to basically any museum in Florence,” said Scallon, who two months after returning still thinks about her trip every day.
She advises students considering going abroad to “just do it.”
“Don’t have fear,” she said. “You’ll learn a lot about yourself. The world is big but not that big – I met an OSU alum in Amsterdam.”
For more information about studying overseas, visit http://business.oregonstate.edu/international-opportunities.
