Featured Alumni – DEV – The Umbra Institute – Study Abroad in Italy

An Interview with Ariel Stern Umbra Institute Fall 2013 Alum
from Brandeis University

This article is part of Umbra’s Alumni Success Series. Study abroad inspires students from all backgrounds and with all sorts of career goals. Therefore, each article in this series is meant to provide advice for current and former students interested in pursuing the types of careers our alumni hold, with some offering opportunities to connect by email or LinkedIn for further advice. Below is a brief Q&A with Ariel Stern. We encourage you to follow us on LinkedIn so you can read future features!

Alum Ariel Stern Discusses her Career

Umbra: What is your current role and what is something that you enjoy about your job?
Ariel: I am the Global Corporate Responsibility Supervisor at EY (Ernst & Young)*, located in New York. I really enjoy Empowering EY’s 270,000+ employees to participate in corporate responsibility programs, as well as creating and implementing programs for social change. Some of these programs include preparing the next generation for the Future of Work (ages 5-24) by enabling and building the confidence of underserved students and underrepresented groups to encourage them to enter (or re-enter) the job force. The best part of this job is how people from my team are based all around the world! Earlier this year I was able to travel to Australia and meet two of my colleagues.

Umbra: Are there any lessons that you have learned through your job, that you feel like the recent graduates should know?
A: If you don’t love what you do, then don’t go for it. Don’t let society dictate what your career journey is. Don’t be a “doctor” or a “lawyer” because it sounds “good”. Follow your passion.

U: What would you recommend students do while abroad if they are interested in your field?
A: I would absolutely recommend getting engaged in local volunteer opportunities within the community. When I lived in Perugia, I had an internship at the Fair-Trade store. It was very cool to learn about how important Fair Trade is for Italians. By getting engaged in community projects, you can learn how citizens of certain countries, like Italians, are able to impact society in a positive way.

When I worked with a Fair-Trade organization in Perugia and I was able to work at a booth during the fair trade chocolate festival. It was so awesome to see all the different fair-trade organizations across Italy, as well as the Cocoa farmers from Africa, where the beans are sourced from. It was a great opportunity to see the economic model as a whole.

U: Can you explain to our readers why the “triple bottom line” will be important for their future careers??
A: In essence, [the triple bottom line] ensures that businesses are profitable for their stakeholders, while at the same time, being sustainable and giving back to society. It is extremely important in any career or job as each of our companies and the people working for them, affect climate change. I also find that you tend to feel better about doing your job when you know you are having a positive impact on the world!

U: When you think about your time in Italy, is there anything you wish you would have done differently?
A: Absolutely not— I had the most amazing three months. The most important thing I did was I stayed in Italy and traveled the country instead of going to a new country every week. Italy is amazing and there are so many cities and excursions to experience. Enjoy the food, water, culture, and all the past history.

U: Is there any more advice you would like to share with our students and alumni?
A: Learn Italian. Spend time with Italians. Learn how to cook Italian food. Learn as much as you can from the people who are the Culture.

If you have interest in EY as an organization and are looking for more information, feel free to check out these links that Ariel provided us with:

*Note that since our interview with Ariel, she has been promoted to Global Corporate Responsibility Marketing Manager at EY. Congratulations Ariel!

Author Bio
Olivia is a recent graduate of the University of Denver and chose ISI Abroad for her internship in order to gain experience in her fields of study; Communication Studies, Writing Practices, and Marketing. Olivia studied in Perugia in Fall 2019 and looks forward to sharing her love for the city with other students.

Rocco Catrone (right) and some students after their art therapy clinic at the Umbra Institute

An article by Rocco Catrone— adjunct faculty and Behavior Analysis practitioner at Elmhurst College, visiting professor and alumnus of the Umbra Institute.

It has been 7 years since my life changed in ways I never thought possible.

Some days, it feels like a lifetime ago but in even more ways, it was as if it only happened yesterday. In the Fall Semester of 2011, I studied abroad at the Umbra Institute in Perugia. A fairy-tale dream of a medieval town in Central Italy – a place you most likely never heard of beyond those delicious Italian chocolate kisses called Baci. Little did I know that the stone walls, warm welcome from the community, Italian lifestyle, and excellent education would leave me wanting to come back.

So I did.

This summer, I am teaching a course called PSYC 260: Radical Communication which looks at how language affects the way humans behave in politics, education, and religion. Each week, we learn our topics and then apply this to the community through observations in schools, participating in clinics, or simply being integrated in the town we call home for this time.

During one of my favorite observations, my students and a local high school class were able to talk about and compare different idioms used in each of their cultures. The differences between “break and leg” and “into the mouth of the wolf” having the same functional meaning which is not immediately clear just looking at the words. My students and the high schoolers enjoyed this activity so much that we were asked to come back and further look at cultural differences through interviews to learn more about the differences and similarities in Italian and USA culture. This information was learned first-hand and not in some textbook.

The nuances of a culture are more apparent when you are directly living there, surrounded by others who did not grow up in your own cultural context. This is something, which was taught to me during my time here, that I try to bring to my students. We learn in class lectures and class activities how to be more culturally competent – How are choices made? How does different learning histories affect this? How does language factor in all of this?

Perugia is a perfect classroom to learn these topics as it is unlike the more popular Naples, Florence, Milan, or Rome. You live here and are a part of the community. We live in apartments in buildings with other local Italians – not dorms. We learn Italian by ordering food at the grocery store and connecting with the local merchants in the giant open-air markets. Evening walks with friends down the main drag while enjoying gelato. All of this without being glued to a phone or computer.

Perugia has its hold on me and a piece of my heart will always be here. The Umbra staff have been instrumental in my coming back and I thank them every day for giving me this opportunity to do so. I hope to return next year and every year after that to share this wonderful place with my students.

Be sure to check out my students blogs posts during their experiences here tying what they learned in class to the observations!

Click here to learn more about Umbra’s Multicultural Psychology Program and opportunities to study similar topics during a semester abroad.

An article by Dalton Provost

Perugia welcomes students each semester to learn about themselves and the world around them

As the intent of the programs goes, the study abroad experience presents students with a chance to immerse themselves in diverse cultures without forfeiting their academics. It is a time for personal growth and internationalization, but as many students may share, the scholastic elements tend to become less emphasized once overseas as they pursue travel and other opportunities. I, Dalton Provost, as a student at Umbra in the Fall of 2015 found myself considering how to manage school around travel and not the other way around. It was one course, however, that unexpectedly gave way to connections and experiences I had left unconsidered. The course, Community Based Research in Psychology, now known as The Science of Behavioral Change: A Community-Based Approach, led by Dr. John L. Dennis, provided me and other students with opportunities to engage in local research projects designed to benefit the Perugian community. Engrained into the course was experiential learning – known as the flipped classroom – where lectures became collaborative meetings with student-led discussions. Students formed data collection methods, used scientific readings to create materials, and in the end, those that performed highly were invited to continue the work, with the opportunity to become co-authors on the published product. I quickly became thoroughly engaged with the class, and eventually continued working with Dr. Dennis after my time abroad. Two years later, I returned to Perugia, this time dedicating my experience to my academic and career goals.

Upon returning, I published articles in peer-reviewed journals, attained a position as a freelance scientific manuscript editor, and was invited to speak at TEDxPerugia. I feel that without the connections I made at the Umbra Institute, an element of Study Abroad often overlooked, my academic, professional, and personal life would likely not be as promising as they have become.

It is easy to reduce the size of the world when you only see your future in your home country. We fail to consider how many opportunities and experiences are out there, found only when we embrace that they could be ours and forget that the world is only as large as norms suggest.

Dalton Provost, a graduate student at George Washington University, studies Industrial Psychology and engages in research on a variety of topics, including team dynamics, character traits, and personality. In addition to this academic work, he is a freelance editor and reviewer for Melioravit, a Perugia-based company helping international scientists get funded, published, and discovered. He attended the Umbra Institute in the Fall of 2015, coming to us from Santa Clara University.

Christina and her Museum Studies classmates are given a tour of a local museum to learn more about what keeps a museum running

GLASGOW, Scotland — Umbra Institute (Fall 2014) and Roger Williams University (Spring 2016) Alumna, Christina Sargeant, just began her first week at the University of Glasgow where she will be pursuing a Masters in Museum Studies. Thanks to her studies at Roger Williams University, Christina discovered that her love for history and desire to preserve it could ultimately evolve into her ideal career path. This course of study inspired her course selection at the Umbra Institute, in Perugia, Italy, and ultimately, her search for a Graduate Program.

At the Umbra Institute, Christina enrolled in the Museum Studies Internship, which has since evolved into CESP 352: Museum Studies Seminar & Practicum. The Internship, like the Seminar & Practicum, was divided into two parts: the seminar, in which Dr. Antonella Valoroso guided students through disciplinary theory and personal reflection, relative to the historical and cultural functions of a museum; and the internship, or practicum, during which students worked directly with various partnered museums to get hands-on experience in their field of interest. In response to a brief interview, Christina shared, “I enjoyed the archiving work and assisting in the organization of textile artefacts, as it gave me a glimpse into what I might do in the preservation or the archivist department of a museum”.

Christina chose the University of Glasgow primarily because of the way the students are taught there. She described the program as being relatively similar to the course she had taken at Umbra, “…though it is more in depth, including six lectures with coinciding seminars, instead of just one.” In the end, Christina believes that Glasgow’s program shares Umbra’s philosophy of interactivity and community engagement. For example, while enrolled in a restitution and provenance course, she will be complimenting the in-class theory with her work in an exhibit at the Hunterian Museum. “I am building off of the foundation that Umbra provided me with as I increase my knowledge of the subject,” said Christina in reflection as she described how her time at Umbra, which helped prepare her for the Masters program in Glasgow.

When sharing how studying abroad affected her career, Christina ended the interview by saying, “Going to the Umbra Institute opened doors for me in ways that I never expected and I can’t describe how excited I am to start this new chapter of my academic career”.

Thanks to her experiences at home and abroad, Christina is now looking forward to a successful year of hard work and study in Glasgow; due in part to her education but more so to her passion and dedication.