"When you arrive in China, you have to be a blank slate, ready to be filled with all of the experiences that this country can offer."
Marina Sardone is a new honors graduate in International Relations at LUISS and in her last year here she spent five months in Macao through the Exchange Student program: “I’ve always had a great passion for Southeast Asia, and after doing my bachelor’s degree in Political Science I wanted to understand what it means to live, work and study in an environment that is totally different from my own.”
Marina did the course in EU-Asia relations at the Institute of European Studies, as part of the Master in European Studies where she also did an internship: “The IEEM environment,” she says, “is a very informal one: in class there were only about fifteen students so I was able to establish a direct relationship with the professor, who also gave me great suggestions for my thesis.”
Along with Marina were three other students from LUISS, and in Macao there are a lot of international students with whom she was able to create a nice group. But some of her Chinese classmates, explains Marina, were more difficult to get to know: “There are a lot of differences between our country and China, especially for someone who has never had the chance to go abroad and so is more narrow-minded. The challenge is to find common ground that allows for a dialogue between two cultures that are so different.”
Despite this, her experience in Macao “taught me to confront obstacles and to fight to overcome them, without giving up at the first sign of difficulty. In addition, I had the opportunity to research my thesis there, and the good fortune to be able to travel throughout Southeast Asia and visit Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and, of course, China and Hong Kong.”
Now Marina is doing an internship at the Belgian-Italian Chamber of Commerce in Brussels, which she began before receiving her master’s degree: "The months I spent in China were a great thing to talk about in my interviews; the recruiters were really impressed by my CV."
"The time I spent abroad really enriched me from a personal point of view, and I hope that it continues to be important professionally as well." For Marina, it was undoubtedly "an experience to have at least once in my life, starting with the desire to discover new things, without cultural barriers."
