By: Adley Ragan
Hi fellow study abroad students! I would like to start first by introducing myself. My name is Adley Ragan, and I am an upcoming Junior from Nashville, Tennessee and I am pursuing a major in Marketing with a minor in Real Estate. Last Summer I worked at a church camp, called Camp Ozark, and had a great experience meeting new friends from all over the country but, I knew I wanted to challenge myself even more the Summer after my Sophomore year. I have never traveled to Europe before and knew of many older girls who had studied abroad their Summer before Junior year. After reaching out to the older girls who had previously studied in Europe, I was overwhelmed with all the different locations and programs to study through. The three most important factors to me were if the program was in my price range, if the program was in a city I wanted to travel to and live in for a month, and if I could take a class that would transfer over as a credit towards my degree at Alabama. I looked at Lead Abroad in Greece, in Barcelona, and Cape-town in but, the program was out of my budget and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wanted to study abroad in Italy. After talking to an older girl in my sorority, she told me about how she studied abroad with API in Florence, Italy. She told me of how great the program was, all the awesome people she met, the awesome food and culture in Italy, how the program was more affordable, the class she took that transferred over to Bama, how safe she felt in the city, and how much she grew as a person after spending a month in a new, foreign country. After speaking with her, I knew in my gut that the API study abroad program in Florence, Italy was the one for me. It was important to me that I at least knew other students going and after asking around I became good friends with another student at Alabama doing the same program and we even became roommates.