Swiss Miss: Embracing culture, family, and chocolate
By Anika Gupta
This article was printed in Abroad View fall 2006
Angela Evans didn't want to study abroad. But when she found an application packet for Franklin College of Switzerland in her mail, she couldn't help but be intrigued.
"I didn't know anything about Switzerland except its neutrality," she says. "When it came time to decide on what school to go to, I realized that even if I didn't like it, I needed to at least see what Franklin was like."
Unlike the majority of study abroad students, who spend a few months abroad usually during their junior year, Evans enrolled directly at Franklin as a freshman. The school based in Lugano, Switzerland but incorporated as a nonprofit in Delaware that specializes in international education. Students hailing from more than 50 different countries study the founding philosophies of Western civilization and go on two weeks of required "academic travel" every semester.
Switzerland itself is a diverse and complex country, with four national languages and multiple immigrant populations. Despite its diversity, Lugano sometimes felt like a small town to Evans. She discovered, for instance, that grocery stores close by 6 p.m., and nothing is open on Sundays. "I missed things from home like peanut butter," she says. "Those little things made adjusting to college life even more difficult than normal."
The challenges of living in Switzerland: the unfamiliar food and small town schedule proved rewarding as well as frustrating. "I love how everyone goes home to eat lunch," Evans says. "I've loved living in a culture that has a completely different mindset."
Now a senior at Franklin, Angela noticed something else about the Swiss families she met over the years: while they came from a huge variety of cultures and backgrounds, "most of the kids and their parents interacted in the school setting with the idea of assimilation, not integration, and kept their culture within their different groups." She proposed setting up an after-school intercultural exchange program, where local people and immigrants could celebrate their cultures on common ground.
"It's frustrating that I'm graduating in May," says Evans, who acknowledges the program might not develop before she has to leave, "and it's hard to get residency in Switzerland."
Evans plans to return and finish the project, if at all possible. "I would love to live in Switzerland again," she says.
And to think just four years ago she didn't think she'd like it at all.