Last Sunday I cluelessly exited the plane and entered my new life in Italy with nearly one hundred pounds worth of luggage and an address to my new home. As soon as I arrived to Aparto, I treated myself to my first of many croissants and bought my first legal celebratory bottle of wine for $3.50. Although I was drained from fighting jet lag, my excitement pushed me through orientation and miles of walking through the city. Slowly I began to get my bearings straight and since, I have mastered my commute to work, IES, and class. According to my apple watch, I have walked nearly 72 miles since our arrival, however most of these miles have been from one meal to the next. This past Saturday, I took my first ever train ride to Lake Maggiore and was shocked by its beauty. As a group, we boated to three of the main islands and explored the small streets, restaurants, and magnificent views of the mountain ranges with small towns tucked in overlooking the lake. The next day a group of myself and ten others woke up at 4:30 am and headed to take a train to Monterosso, one of the first of the Cinque Terre, meaning five lands. After a three hour ride consisting mostly of naps, we arrived to the small mountainous town on the Ligurian Sea filled with colorful buildings and beach chairs lining the water. We adventured the town and had breakfast before securing chairs on the water for the day. I made one of my favorite investments of the trip and bought a snorkel set which we all used to swim out and see the fish. After a long day of swimming, tanning, and snacking we boarded the train home where we entertained the cabin with games and laughs for four hours. After arriving back to Milan we ate dinner along the canal and prepared for our internships the next day.
Outside the classroom, I have started a marketing and communications internship at SuiteFood, a women owned start up business located in Milan. SuiteFoods goal is to make ready to cook asian cuisine so you can “explore flavors, without borders”. At the moment, SuiteFood is very similar to brands we know such as HelloFresh which provide easy to cook meal kits. However, founder Emmanuela has created a new line in which myself and Tiffany, a fellow student at Lehigh, will be working on promoting. The new line contains easy to make coconut milk, coconut water and curry and will be launched in mid July. For the internship we are in charge of the promotion and countdown to create exposure and publicity around the new product launch. To do so, we will make Tik Toks, reels and Instagram posts. From these, we will analyze the views and traffic on her website to see what is the most effective marketing strategy and what audience we should target.
This summer I have the pleasure of taking another class with Professor Gupta where we will learn about Corporate Social responsibility along with a separate internship seminar class. So far, we have studied Adam Smith and how his theories have impacted the free market and the economy today through two interesting videos. From these videos we have made numerous connections between current events that tie back to the beliefs and theories of Adam smith. We have been encouraged to read the Wall Street Journal and for homework we have picked articles to write about and educate the class on controversial current events today. Additionally, we visited a firm called Circularity where we learned about a circular economy opposed to the linear economy we live in today. The idea of a circular economy is to reduce the amount of waste by mitigating the current “take, make, waste” economy and create a make, use, recycle to re-use model. The idea of this is that anything that is created must have an end plan before it is even made. For example, if a company is making clothing, each material put into the product must have a plan as to where it will go and how it will be reused at the end of its life resulting in no waste. This was a very interesting concept which many Italians are passionate about.
