Italy: Alice Overland

Program: UW in Florence, Spring

Alice’s Major: Psychology

A group of nine women stand on the street
My friends and I on our last night in Florence heading to the farewell dinner.

What is your most memorable experience from your program?

I really enjoyed the paper marbling workshop that our UW professor Lee Palmer took us on. It was a wonderful opportunity to learn the trade of paper marbling and we also got to create our own. Our whole class had a lot of fun helping each other pick out colors and patterns for our paper.

How were your program academics similar or different from taking classes at UW–Madison?

A group of four women stand together smiling
CET took us on a hike in the Tuscan countryside.

My program academics were at a very similar difficulty level to ours at UW. However, there was not as many assignments. For the majority of my classes we only had a paper, quiz, or tests contributing to our grades, while at UW we have many assignments each week.

What challenges or barriers did you face as you prepared to go abroad and/or during your time abroad? How did you work through them?

I have never been away from home for that long and I really struggled with not being able to visit my parents on the weekend if I wanted to. It was also hard to keep in regular contact with them that was not just texting because of the time change. I worked through making a set time each week to video chat my parents or my friends and then I tried to spend a lot of time exploring the city instead of just sitting in my apartment.