What I Learned from an Impromptu Trip to Italy

When I graduated college, I was determined to move to Italy. At the time I didn’t really articulate my reasons, but looking back, I can name a few. I had an overly romantic view of life, pride in my Italian heritage, and had become jaded by American consumerism. Like many young people, I was also struggling with the transition to full-time work life. The previous year, I had studied in Rome for four months, and the contrast between my Italian life and my American life was staggering for me.

I’m sure my family and friends tired of hearing about the schemes I had been contemplating: I applied to Grad School in Rome, sent inquiries to local companies in Italian cities, studied VISA laws, and asked my Italian friends about opportunities. I also created budgets to determine how long my savings would last me in different scenarios abroad. In short, I was willing to sacrifice many things (first and foremost financial security and a “career”) to simply live in Italy.

But I settled instead. There are countless blogs that will tell you that the time to travel is in your 20’s, and that if you wait and put it off, you will find that  your youth and all chances of true adventure have passed you. I was always scared of being the person these writers warned you of becoming.

I did travel to Italy last year, but it wasn’t the epic multi-year escape I had dreamed, and it definitely wasn’t the zen experience all those blogs talked about. But it also wasn’t that conventional trip I had always abhorred - the typical 10 day, 7 city jaunt complete with guided tours, fannypacks, nice hotels and tourist traps that had pushed me to overcompensate with my own vision in the first place.

At the time, I had just accepted a job at a new company and asked for the latest start date possible, but I only managed to buy myself 3 weeks. Despite this let down, I decided to do the best with what I had. After a week of planning, I flew into Milan, spent 5 days in Lake Como, 3 days in Rome revisiting old haunts, and 1 week volunteering on a farm in Tuscany. I learned some things along the way.

1. Life is a Series of Opportunities

Consumed by ideas of an Italian adventure and certain that I wouldn’t be in the US for long, I stubbornly refused to consider any long-term commitments, avoiding them like the plague. The problem with this is that I never made any concrete plans to go abroad, just schemes. It’s like telling your Mom that you can’t have any of the homemade pasta that she made because you’re saving up for the tacos you wish you had.

This brings me to my realization: life is a series of opportunities, not choices. Barely in my twenties, and with no responsibilities to tie me down, I saw my life as an infinite set of choices. I imagined myself doing anything and everything, but I didn’t realize that only a few of those were true opportunities.

After making more out of those 3 weeks than I ever knew possible, I tried to look at things in a new light. Many people give you an earful about regret, but in my experience, most people talk about the opportunities that they didn’t recognize soon enough rather than the big risks that didn’t pay off. The only way to avoid this is to become an opportunist, and to realize there are unique advantages to almost every phase and journey of life.

Now, I try to treat opportunism like voting - it’s best practiced early and often.  

When you think about the most successful people in history, there are definitely many stories of individuals that carried out their childhood dream by relentlessly driving towards it. But more often than not, you hear of those that were flexible, saw an opportunity, and ran with it.

2. Live Simply

The farm in Tuscany was the most memorable part of my trip. I volunteered at a small olive grove and vineyard owned by a German couple that had moved to Italy 30-some years ago, and proceeded to raise 3 boys on the property. I had wanted to WWOOF (worldwide organization of organic farmers, often used as a verb) for quite some time. After looking at hundreds of farms, these people were by far my first choice because they had a gorgeous farm and a love for classic books and music.

Although volunteering in Tuscany can seem very romantic, the work I did was not. Most of the work in olives happens during harvest in the fall but it was late spring when I arrived. Instead, the big task was cutting the grass between the trees. Since the terrain is very hilly and the grass hadn’t been cut since the fall, I spent hours bulldozing chest-high grass with a weedwacker - oddly satisfying. I also helped them build an addition to their farmhouse by mixing cement in a wheelbarrow with a shovel.

I probably only worked 20 hours the entire week! This is because their approach to work was very simple. 2 of the days it was raining, and they said “It’s raining, so we don’t work today”. One of the days was a national holiday, and so we had a barbeque instead. I don’t mean to say they were lazy. Quite the opposite. Even when they weren’t working, they were still around the farm tinkering with something. In many ways, they just had a different view of work and leisure. It reminded me of something my Grandma always says - all in moderation.

Every night, we had the pleasure of eating dinner outside. This included a homecooked meal, lots of conversation, and a little wine from the vineyard. Breakfast consisted of assorted breads, fruit and coffee. One day, we had whole cooked artichokes as a snack. I had never done this before, but it was so wonderfully simple - you just start by eating the softer parts of the leaves and find more and more edible parts until you get to the heart.

They had a TV, but it was a small 1990’s box that was placed on their piano bench when they wanted to watch something. TV bingeing was replaced by other forms of entertainment. There were many instruments in the house (their 3 sons are all musical, playing piano, cello and violin in that order, and the youngest is a world renowned virtuoso), and almost every wall was covered with books in 4 different languages. The fact that their boys turned out to be extremely bright is no accident. It’s amazing what people can accomplish when they aren’t saturated with distractions.

This was the real takeaway for me. I had too many distractions at home. I have since worked diligently on trying to reduce these and focus on the important things, but it’s a challenge. At some point, there is so much going on in our lives that we can’t really savor one thing. It’s amazing how enjoyable a simple conversation or a book can be when you stop worrying about the other 1000 things you’re trying to do.

3. The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side

There are two reasons why I resisted this realization for a long time: (1) I hate cliches and (2) “the grass is always greener” has always seemed like a cynical phrase. Back when I first graduated from college, it felt like a saying people used to demean my motivations for going to Italy and reduce them to a child’s fantasy. I took offense to this perceived slight, which probably led to the very impression I feared.

But I was truly taken aback when one of my Italian friends told me they wished they had Starbucks in Italy. I could have screamed. To me, Italy was the escape from America’s over-branded consumerism. A place where coffee emphasized tradition, quality, service and good taste rather than branding, marketing, and competition. Starbucks is literally a poor imitation of Italian coffee culture. The CEO and founder made a trip to Milan, and was so impressed by its cafes that he decided to try to recreate them in America… and failed.

However, I saw that same disbelief in my Italian friends, when I told them of my dream of living in Italy. I had just received a job from one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S. by simply attaching my resume to a website and chatting with a few people in a cafe for an hour; a job that would guarantee me enough means to live on my own (it is very common for Italians to live with their parents through their 20’s), and that would also offer me optimistic prospects for future wealth. Meanwhile, Italy has a 40% unemployment rate among young people, and most students there simply shrug when asked about their opportunities after college. To them, (much like the Starbucks example) America represents everything that Italy is not: efficient, dynamic, relevant, and wealthy.

4. Sometimes, Things Just Go Your Way

I’ve never considered myself a very lucky person. Most people just don’t feel that way. But with only a week to plan my trip, I had to leave a lot up to chance. I was still buying hotels and train tickets on my iphone (trying to gather what WIFI service I could) while travelling.

If I had bought my flight a couple weeks earlier, it would probably have cost $400 more. If it hadn’t happened to be a National Holiday during one of the 3 (week)days I was in Rome, I would not have been able to see some old friends. If my trip had been just one week earlier, I would have missed my chance to stay at the farm in Tuscany. If my cousin had not told me that a family friend was in Milan, I would have missed out on some pretty incredible times. Even just a week before I left, I found out that some of my college friends from Maryland were going to be in Rome at the same time, and we ended up sharing an apartment! What I initially feared to be a solitary trip ended up being one full of good company.

While not a very superstitious person, I can’t ignore that these things just seemed to work out. I didn’t have perfect weather every day, and I did catch a cold. Other than that, I had as perfect of a trip as you could imagine.

For this reason, I can add one last lesson learned from my trip:

5. Be Grateful

College Regrets

I have many regrets from my college years. Although it is stereotypically entertaining to talk of college in terms of all the crazy things we did on campus, I think that most people regret the things they didn’t do rather than the mistakes they made.

This is because college (as it stands today) is a unique experience in a young person’s life, and unique experience means unique opportunities. College students are capable enough to do all the things that grownups do, but lack the drag of full-time responsibility. And a college campus is a resource like no other - filled with peers, mentors, and facilities only rivalled by major metropolises.

I think there are a few reasons why it’s common to waste so much of this opportunity in college. Most people point the finger at the immaturity and lack of discipline that seems to be a hallmark of that age. This was definitely true for me, and I think unavoidable for almost all of us. Think about how much you have matured since college, or even how much you matured during college. Unfortunately, our current culture and expectations for students actually contribute to their lack of accountability.

One of the greatest marks of adulthood is fiscal responsibility - that is, working to support your lifestyle. The problem is that the cost of college education is so high at this point, it is almost impossible for a student to take on its costs singlehandedly. Either their parents pay, or they take out loans.

For me, it was a little bit of both, but in my last year my Dad started to share this burden with me, and I am grateful to him for making this push in a small but noticeable way. I forget the details of the deal, but I think I paid half my tuition and half my living costs; the effect was staggering. For the first 3 years of college, I worked the minimum number of hours at my job on campus and was taking an average of 15 credits per semester. During my senior year, I worked 20 hours a week, including a 5 PM -12 AM shift on Tuesday night followed by a 5:30 AM - 9 AM shift Wednesday morning, and I took 18 and 19 credits for my Fall and Spring semesters respectively. At the same time, I interviewed for 10 different companies and probably had more of a social life than any other year.

You may think it odd that I increased my school workload when I clearly had less free time, but I think it’s only natural. We all have encountered this phenomenon before that when you are busier, you also find more time. This is because inaction breeds more inaction and action breeds more action.

The other cause for my increased efficiency was that I felt more responsible for myself on a macro level. I felt a sense of purpose, which made the way forward clearer to me. I have very few regrets from my senior year.

Recently, I have been pursuing a graduate degree, and this time I am paying my own way. I have never been this disciplined at school or this conscious of its importance. In fact, there is still a big difference between my outlook senior year (when I was taking on part of the cost of my education) and now, and I think this is because in the back of my mind I knew there was an obvious safety net if I couldn’t come up with the money. If I had told my Dad that I was too busy to work because of my studies, he probably would have understood as would most parents.

Another reason students squander opportunity is the enormous amount of poor advice given (most time unsolicited) by authority figures. Many of these people do not have the experience and wisdom their job titles imply - guidance counselor, academic advisor, professor. Most of their advice has a negative connotation, attempting to tell students the pitfalls to avoid. More times than not, it amounts to a series of checkmarks that only give the appearance of success: good grades, a full resume, attendance at networking events, etc. None of these things actually preclude learning, which should be the number one priority of higher education. If students spend their time running around fulfilling checklists of what is expected of them, they will never learn to think for themselves.

How do we break this vicious cycle? So far, I have been pretty negative, so I am going to talk about positive mindsets that every college freshman should learn to embrace in order to make the most of their time.

Challenge Yourself Academically

If you do not feel challenged academically, then you need to rethink your education because there is a direct correlation between learning and adversity.

I was not challenged. I was a business major, and the overall impression at that school was that if you weren’t taking Accounting or Finance, an A was expected. I attended the Robert H. Smith school of Business, but we had another name for it - the Robert H. Smith school of Multiple Choice. My study time was very minimal, and my GPA numbers make me look like a genius. I’m definitely not a genius, but every test was (you guessed) multiple choice and the subject material only required you to memorize facts.

There was also a more subtle issue with the work I was doing. The business school didn’t necessarily need to water down subjects or inflate grades for my education to be devalued - some of the subjects were simply not rich in academic material.

Marketing is a good example. There is only so much you can do in a Marketing course outside of learning definitions of concepts. Of course, it is much more valuable for students to execute various group and individual projects, like an advertising campaign. But aren’t these students supposed to learn concepts before applying them? This is the conundrum that subjects like Marketing face. The truth is that every concept you need to know in Marketing you learned as a kid when you ran a lemonade stand. In college, you simply learn the names of those concepts and hear examples of how certain businesses applied them. Of course, professors do not want to tell you that their field is sparse in subject matter, so instead they serve up classes to be something more mysterious and and complicated than they actually are. This is quite hurtful to education, because it mystifies the world in the students’ eyes rather than clarifying it.

Not all majors are created equal. Anybody who tells you this is either lying or confused. This illusion (often perpetrated by those authority figures) leads many students to become agnostic about how much they are being challenged.

Of course, many counselors will tell you that some majors clearly lead to better job prospects than others, but this is really the only comparison they draw between different subjects. I never heard a counselor admit that some subjects are simply not as valuable as others from an educational viewpoint.

I once was training to become an Outdoor Excursion leader (the fact that I did not finish this training can be logged as another college regret), and one of our first assignments attempted to explain the concept of “adventure learning”.

Our teacher drew 3 concentric circles on the ground and asked us to imagine that we were leading a kayaking expedition. You take 40 novices out on this trip, and you start on the very outside circle. This represents absolutely calm waters. This may be safe and enjoyable, but the students don’t learn anything about balance or paddling techniques or how to look for signs of danger. Then you try the very inside circle. This represents the most difficult possible setting where the group is thrown into a riptide from the start. This is clearly a dangerous and terrible idea, but it is also an atmosphere detriment to learning. How can these people learn while overwhelmed by the dangers and obstacles they face?

It is true of almost all learning that there is a Goldilock zone, where one is challenged and under stress but not lost. Universities should strive for this as a formula for maximizing education in the short time their students have. This means creating an environment where it is safe to make a mistake. A C+ in a very difficult class should be valued higher than an A in Fluff 101, but I have never felt like that is the case.

Cut Your Own Path

In my experience, peer pressure is discussed most in highschool, but I think it is more important in college, where the sobering influences of family and lifelong friends are absent. The large majority of students are on campus for a free ride, and pressure others to join in on that mindset, both overtly and subconsciously. There are various programs and activities I failed to participate in; I hesitated partly because I was worried what my peers would think.

For example, I studied abroad in Rome during my junior year. I went through the program at my university which set up student housing in apartments near the Italian school with the other study abroad students. On the face of it, this seemed like a sweet deal, but one of the main reasons I studied abroad was that I wanted to become fluent in Italian. If you want to learn another language, then you should live with locals. But instead of going out on my own and securing lodging with a host family, I accepted the student housing.

Why? Partially because I was lazy. But I think it was also because 90% of my peers viewed study abroad as one long Eurotrip, and I was afraid to be the outcast with no friends in a foreign country. Luckily, I cut my own path upon arriving in Italy, spending most of my time with locals or 4-year international students. I learned so much more of the culture and language this way (which really should be the goal of study abroad), but not living with a host family is my biggest regret from my time abroad.

There are other examples I can give here, but I would rather end this section by saying that most of the really cool things happening at Universities are not happening in the mainstream. Outdoor excursions, robotics competitions, living & language programs, radio stations, writing clubs, theatre - these are all things in which less than 5% of the population participate. Sporting events, parties and bars are all great, but I suspect that some students attend these out of peer pressure rather than pure interest.

Pursue Your Passions

If you are considering a career or future in some field, the best thing for you to do is to start immediately. If you want to be a software engineer, try writing code. If you want to be a businessman, start a company. If you want to be a designer, design something. There is this myth that students need to wait until graduation to do all these things, and it is the most dangerous mindset on campus.

In fact, college is a perfect time to do these things, because there is usually a lot of free time (like summer and winter breaks), low levels of accountability and access to many resources.

Some of my passions are writing, programming, playing the piano, and learning languages. I wrote for the University of Maryland newspaper, but not enough! I should have taken on more assignments as these were awesome chances to publish for a large audience. I’m now having trouble finding a piano teacher, but if I had pursued this in college, I could have received free access to grand pianos at the school of music and cheap teachers in the form of my friends there.

The University of Maryland had this program called the language house that allowed you to apply for accommodation in a dorm where students were only allowed to speak a foreign language. There were different sectors (called “clusters”) of the building for the various cultures - Italian, Spanish, German, Persian, French, Russian and many others. I never applied, and I realized in my senior year that this was a big mistake. At the time, I felt that there would be plenty of opportunities down the road for language immersion.

Breaking the Pattern

For those of you who lament all that wasted time in college, be sure not to make the same mistake again. Think about what your future will be like in the next 5 years and ask yourself this question: what is unique about my current situation?

Do you plan on having kids soon? If so, what can you do now that you couldn’t do then? Do you already have kids? What opportunities do you have now that you won’t once they fly the coop?

It is never too late to correct your mistakes. I didn’t challenge myself enough in college, and now I am pursuing a Masters in Applied Mathematics, basically starting over with my education. Now is the best time for me to do this, since I don’t have a family or any other big responsibilities outside work.

It is all too common for us to realize the unique opportunities in our lives only after they pass.

2015 Goals

My friend Greg just posted his 2015 goals, and challenged me to do the same. Luckily, I've already written mine down, so this is just an exercise in justification.

I believe there is value in creating goals every year, even though I freely admit that I am almost always overly ambitious with them. Last January, I crafted lofty goals and failed to accomplish just about all of them. So what is different this year? For one, I hope this post will be a good step towards accountability which may be the most important facet of goal setting.

Also, I think that I am finally starting to get the sort of discipline needed to pursue my passions. I've always had too many interests, but this past year I made big strides in pursuing them, by (among other things) starting Grad School, getting a new job at work, and setting PRs in running. I believe I have momentum, and I plan to use it.

Learn 30 Songs on the Piano

I have never had a piano lesson, but have always had a huge passion for music. Lately, I have become especially interested in classical piano music, mostly Chopin and Bach. I have learned (by reading sheet music slowly and the committing to memory) 10-12 songs on the piano in the past 2 years, ranging from 2-4 minutes in length each. This year, I think I can learn 30 if I just devote a little time regularly.

Write 12 Essays/Blog Posts

Make that 11. Length is not too important, but relentlessness and consistency are.

Read 40 Books

I have always been a big reader, but I actually think I am a pretty slow reader too. I have never read as many as 40 books in one year, but this is really just an exercise in substituting reading for TV at certain times. For comparison, I read 16 books in 2014.

Write 12 Programs

I currently have 2 programs I am working on in Python - one to simulate a card game and another to graph linear trendlines on select data sets. Since I am currently pursuing a Masters in Applied Math, this skill is more important to me than ever.

Bench 200

This might be the most difficult goal for me. My body is simply not built for power lifting. I have been working on my bench for a few years now, and I still have not benched more than 170 lbs. The goal is to lift 200 at least 4 times.

Run 19:00 5K

I ran my first 5K last year, and then shattered my PRs for most distances longer than a mile. My current best is 20:24, which means I need to find a way to shave off approximately 30 seconds per mile. I have never really tried interval training so I think that will be the first thing I do on my way to this goal.

Run 5:15 Mile

Best time that I have officially recorded is 6:00.

As in All Grad School Classes

I took my first Grad School class this year, and I simply wasn't prepared. I had a really bad start, and then worked very hard to pull out a B. The experience was very trying, and I now feel much more confident for having gone through it. I am enrolled in 2 courses for this spring - Computational Complexity and Probabilistic Graphical Theories.

If I take those 2 courses as planned, 1 this summer, and 2 again in the fall, then I will have 5 chances to make this goal a reality.

Take on a Leading Role at Work

As I mentioned in the beginning of the post, I am starting a new job at work this year. I have now been out of college a little more than 3 years, and the working world has been a great learning experience. I want to become a leader (in whatever minor way I can) in my new role.

Speak Italian Better than Ever

It is a lifelong goal of mine to become fluent in another language - particularly Italian. It is difficult for me to pursue this wholeheartedly when I live in the U.S. However, as long as I can say with confidence that I am more comfortable with the language at the end of the year than I was at the beginning, I will be one step closer.

2015 Mottos

In working towards these goals, I have also thought of some new mottos to live by. These have been rolling around in my head for the past year, and I would just like to document them here. Dear friends, if I am not living these out, please point out my hypocrisy!

Let Your Actions Define You
Listen
Be Organized and Prepared
Serve Others