There are many opportunities for students to study abroad at Benedictine College such as the Florence program –– offered during the fall and spring semester each year in Italy.
While abroad, students embrace Italian culture by trying out new foods, visiting historic
architecture, and learning Italian.
Daniel Musso, advisor of the Florence study abroad program since 2006, believes the opportunity to study in another country enriches students’ lives in many ways.
“Students go and study things in a place where those things are learned, like studying
Renaissance art while being in Florence”, he said.
Being exposed to a different culture, learning how to deal with different people and meeting people who have a different background and language help students become more self-reliant.
Musso said he sees students gain a lot of confidence from being in unfamiliar situations, which is a skill that employers value.
Another thing Musso talks about is community.
He describes that a community experience as a way students can “form bonds of friendship.”
Every semester, faculty members from the Benedictine campus are selected to teach abroad in Florence.
“We ask the faculty to apply once a year for the upcoming terms and they have to specify
what classes they will teach there”, he said.
Musso says that the faculty would need to specify who would take over their classes for
the semester on the main campus and, depending on the number of faculty applicants determines who is picked, seniority staff are prioritized.
Student perspectives are important when it comes to study abroad programs. Hearing
student perspectives can help contribute to deciding whether to study abroad.
Caroline Bolan, a senior and Matthew Matista, a junior, both studied in Florence during the Spring 2024 semester.
Bolan said she wanted to study abroad because she had “never traveled out of the country
before,” because it was something new for her. Meanwhile, Matista said that he wanted to study abroad because he knew of friends who studied in Florence last year. Further, his grandfather was born there, and that is where his origins come from.
“My whole side of my dad’s family is very Italian, so it was to visit where my family is
from,” he said.
Community also plays a role in studying abroad. For a semester, students are surrounded
by more than 40 classmates.
Bolan said that the school trips she went on during the semester with all her classmates were rewarding. She said there were opportunities to “see all these amazing places together and
experience it all together.”
In addition, she recalled spending nearly 4 hours on a charter bus with her classmates
thinking how it helped bring them together as a group. Ultimately, Bolan describes her classmates as being family.
“I just think that traveling together and just being a whole and being family by the end of
it was seriously something that I just respected and loved out of the entire experience.”
Studying abroad can also result in students being enriched in confidence and
knowledge.
Matista said the study abroad program prepared him well for worldwide travel
on his own.
“Not only did I fly from San Francisco to Rome on my own, I also spent a whole week in
Greece” he said.
Even though he traveled to foreign countries where he did not know the language or
have good WIFI, he still felt that traveling helped him be “set up well for the rest of my life and
my travel experience.”
Musso strongly encouraged students to consider attending the Florence Study Abroad
Program because it can help them learn about and navigate foreign countries, be enriched in knowledge, make unforgettable memories and make life-long
friendships.
