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A Semester to Build On

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Emily Orell
Emily Orell

While Keene State College students were settling into their classroom seats for the second day of classes last Tuesday, Emily Orell, a junior architecture major from Westfield, MA, was settling into an airplane seat, getting set for a flight to Berlin, Germany, where she will spending the fall semester.

Orell, a dean’s list student, will be attending the CIEE (Council on International Educational Exchange) Global Institute in Berlin. CIEE offers study-abroad and scholarship opportunities to US students willing to participate in a very collaborative program that includes interactions with students in Barcelona, Prague, and New York.

“I feel very lucky to have this opportunity,” said Orell, who received a global architecture scholarship.

The trip came to fruition thanks to a collaboration among Bart Sapeta, an associate professor of architecture at Keene State, Maria Aiolova, the director of CIEE, and Dr. Skye Stephenson, the director of the College’s Global Education Office.

Sapeta learned about the study-abroad opportunity after participating last summer in a faculty-developed program sponsored by CIEE that included visits to Prague and Berlin. Developing contacts with architecture schools that collaborate with CIEE in both cities, he reached out to Orell just in time for her to enroll in the Institute.

While in Germany, Orell will take a wide array of architecture classes that look at the role of architectural design in everyday life. “My architecture program at Keene State focuses a lot on the science behind architecture and the program in Berlin is going to be a lot of design, which I’m really interested in,” she said. “Hopefully, I can balance out what I know in the sciences and apply it to the design.”

Sapeta, who participated as a student in an architecture study-abroad program in Denmark, said he’s always looking for opportunities to help Keene State students. He’s currently working with a program in Florence, Italy, at the Lorenzo de Medici International Institute and also trying to assemble an interdisciplinary team of students who would work on a design for a Peace Embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “I believe that study abroad is one of the most effective experiences that instill the need for inclusiveness in our increasingly connected world,” he said.

Orell, who is also minoring in German, hopes to attend graduate school and eventually work designing commercial buildings. “I think Keene State has helped prepare me for my future,” said Orell. “I took commercial construction this past semester and it made me to want to do more in that aspect of architecture.”

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