Study Abroad

For Goal 9, I opted to complete a Study Abroad with Longwood University. I originally intended to go on Dr. Miskec’s “Children’s Literature in the Former Yugoslavia.” This involved an intensive-style ENGL 445 course whilst abroad in Croatia and Serbia. Unfortunately, due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the trip was cancelled and I will have to complete the course during the Fall 2020 semester.

While the trip being cancelled was unfortunate, I am very thankful that the university chose not to compromise student and faculty health. I am also grateful that the Honors College offered a list of alternatives so that I could still receive credit to go toward my Honors distinction at graduation. The alternative I chose is BUSI 3101, or Fashion and Business in France, which is offered by CIEE. The course started on May 18th and concludes on June 15th.

While I am only a week into the intensive, I love the content and the professors seem very nice. I have two professors, one who handles the fashion industry specifically and one who handles the business aspect of the course. So far, students have been reading case studies on very important, high-end designers like Burberry, Michael Kors, Calvin Klein, OffWhite, and more. We have also had to complete questions about each case study for our participation grades, as we are not able to meet in a physical location.

I wanted to take this specific course because I’ve always been interested in fashion as a hobby, and I wanted to know more about the ins and outs of the business as well as behind-the-scenes details. There’s a lot of interesting controversy and history that go into the fashion industry, and this course allows me to explore an overview of them.

The most challenging part of the course so far has probably been the due dates. I went into the course acknowledging that it was a month-long intensive. Therefore, I understood that the work would be of a higher stress level. But I didn’t anticipate having to turn all of my assignments in by 5:59pm each day. Because Longwood’s in-person courses all deal in the same time zone, we have the luxury of our assignments being due at 11:59pm. However, because my professors are based in Paris and the time zone is six hours ahead of ours, all of our assignments must have an earlier due date. However, I’ve been able to handle it so far which is definitely a blessing!

Overall, I’m loving the course and I’m also learning a lot about some of my favorite brands! While an in-person experience was the ideal, I never would’ve known about this opportunity otherwise, so there are certainly bright spots even during odd times like these.

Below I have included my second participation assignment, in which I was asked to complete a series of questions about Virgil Abloh, Calvin Klein, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution concerning the fashion industry.