Anne

My entire life, I dreamed of living in Paris. My childhood (and now, adulthood) was transient, as I called five cities home before arriving in Paris for my junior year abroad. After graduating from college, I worked in Washington, D.C., but constantly felt France pulling at me to return. After two years in Washington, I moved to Aix-en-Provence, France under the guise of teaching English, but for me it was a chance to recalibrate my career and life goals. My bachelor’s studies had focused on journalism, creative writing, and French, and since graduating, I’d been looking into a wide array of master's programs—everything from graphic design to marketing to media studies. None of them grabbed me until I happened upon AUP’s Master of Arts in Global Communication (MAGC) while I was living in Aix, and was immediately attracted to its international and liberal arts-inspired approach—and Paris.   

While I was anticipating that my studies would benefit from Paris’s global community, I hadn't considered how transformative the AUP cultural trips would be. These trips have allowed me to apply our theoretical work beyond the classroom and have revolutionized the way I experience the world. Thus far, my courses have taken me to London; Rajasthan, India, where I interviewed inspiring musicians at the World Sacred Music Festival about their music and their faith; Krakow, Poland, where we explored the concept of memorial museums at Auschwitz and analyzed how we might apply historical lessons to modern events; and Jura, France, where we observed cheese production from start to finish and met with local producers and experts whom Professor Christy Shields has known for decades.