Exchange programme at LUISS, Rome
Going to do the exchange program was one of the best decisions of my life. These five months in Italy was the brightest period of my student life. In this review I am going to tell about incredibly useful subjects in one of the best universities in Italy, friends from all over the world and traveling across this beautiful country.
I considered the opportunity to go on exchange for a long time, but finally decided to do this on the last year of the Master’s. By this time, I have already been working in a big international company for more than a year and great career opportunities were shining there for me, so to stop working for six months seemed to be a quite risky deal. Now I understand that it all was worth it as my exchange semester helped me to develop both hard and soft skills and made me more open-minded.
So, I finally decided to go for exchange, filed an application, got the approval of it, at the end of the year I have learnt that I was nominated for a scholarship, after I got the visa approval and headed to my favorite European city - Rome. LUISS is one of the best universities in Italy for economics and management studies. Studying here is not easy, but the university has still managed to make the student life as interesting and active as possible. Inside our campus there are a lot of places for study, so you don’t need to think for a long time where to go to do a group project or to write a term paper. In addition, LUISS has a special café for international communication Language Café, where Italian students come to get acquainted with the exchange ones. There, by the way, there is a rule - it is forbidden to communicate in Italian! Another big plus is the ability to pass the final exam twice in most cases without any penalties.
One of the great advantages of studying abroad in many universities is the opportunity to choose subjects that are out of scope of your major study program, but may be still useful to you from your perspective. For me this was the case with Accounting. My major is marketing. In HSE, this study program is very intensive and comprehensive, so when choosing marketing subjects at LUISS I doubted as to whether I could get any new knowledge for myself. I definitely could, and a lot. I learned frameworks for making creatives for marketing communication (subject of Marketing Communications and New Media), how to plan digital campaigns (Web Analytics), and how to organize marketing in a company (from an organizational point of view). In addition, I had projects with companies like Procter & Gamble, I attended TED talks event for the first time in my life and LVMH career day.
Perhaps the most important thing was the opportunity to make friends with people from all over the world. This experience allowed me to learn about life, traditions and views of people coming from completely different cultures, from European to Latin American.
Although the study was intensive, I managed to travel a lot across Italy. This is an incredibly beautiful and diverse country, I traveled to the bright and colorful Naples, climbed to Vesuvius, saw medieval Florence, took a typical tourist photo in Pisa, visited the local “red light district” in Catania, walked around the Godfather sites in Palermo, saw the balcony from which Juliet talked to Romeo in Verona, walked through the canals of Venice and understood what real hospitality of the South of Italy is when visiting my friend's home in Calabria.
It is hard to fit everything in one post, but to conclude I want to say one thing: going for study abroad is an invaluable experience that I wish everyone to get.