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Kori in the Country of Small Things

, by Fabio Todesco
When she found out she was going to fly from California to Italy for a one-year exchange she jumped for joy. And now she's enjoying her experience, both in the cosmopolitan city and travelling around the country she has adopted for a year
Cinque Terre
Milan
Eurochocolate Perugia

Last February, when she discovered that her application for a one-year exchange to Italy and Bocconi had been accepted, Kori Kira Juan posted a video on YouTube showing herself jumping for sheer joy. You won't find it any more because it was intended to be the first video of a vlog and when Kori realized she couldn't make the commitment to post a video every week, she preferred to erase it. But you can find a hint of her excitement at the news in one of her blog entries.

This 20 year old American student of Asian origin (half Korean-half Filipino) is determined to extract the most out of her Italian experience, both from an academic and a personal perspective. She's paying for her exchange with the money earned working as a student assistant at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she's attending a letters and science program with a major in business and economics, and she's now spending it travelling around Italy and Europe.

"My boss at UCSB was Italian", she says, "and she contributed to my love for Italy". Kori's commitment to spend some time in Europe was strong and she opted for a full year following the advise of older UCSB students who came to Bocconi in the past. "Truth is that, at first, I thought of London, because of the language, but then I decided to come to Italy because I considered it a quieter and safer place".

It's likely that her fascination for small things played a part in her choice. Her blog is about small things, a collection of small experiences. She's studying hard and has passed her midterm exams at Bocconi with good marks, but you won't get this kind of information from her blog. Since September, when she arrived in Milan, she has travelled to Verona, Perugia, Paris, Nice, Munich, Venice, Tuscany and Cinque Terre before the floods ("my original project was to have one trip per month, but at the dorm you always find people planning to travel in the weekends..."). Of every place she recalls one small, special thing happened to her: "It's about experiences, not about destinations".

Her idea of Italy was that of the Italian small towns and she was expecting a deeper cultural shock than the one experienced in Milan. "Milan is a big, international town", she says, "my dorm mates are international students and my BIEM classmates speak English. So I had a soft impact, but now I'd like to immerse more in Italian culture, have more interactions with Italian students, and put my Italian to the test".

At UCSB Kori was used to large classes and is favorably impressed by the 40-student size of BIEM groups and by the interaction with the professors, even if she would like more variety in the style of the lessons.

"I've always lived in the same small area around Santa Barbara", Kori says, "and was accustomed to a routine: the same places, the same friends, the same associations; here in Italy there is much more variability, you decide what to do day-by-day. It's a change – and not a small one".

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