Wenyao Tang and Natalie Soloperto also studied away this summer within the NYU Global Network.
Wenyao Tang is a rising sophomore from Shanghai. This summer he studied away in New York City. He thinks he is more like a New Yorker than a tourist. He went to classes during the morning and spent the rest of his time working out in the gym and exploring the city with his friends. He also spent time reading in the park and studying for exams in the library.
Wenyao said living and learning in New York City is a very unique experience since everyone can find their own way of living there.
He also provided his advice to students who would like to study in NYC:
Choose your own living style. There are too many things going on in the city. You need to figure out what you want before you do anything.
Natalie Soloperto studied in Florence this summer, trying to discover what exactly had made NYU, more prominently NYU Shanghai, the right fit for her. She wanted to make more sense of herself. She took an art class where she met her teacher, the wonderful Silvia Giorgi in front of Michelangelo's David at the Academia, got lost in the Uffizi Museum between Rooms of Raphael and Leonardo DaVinci, and listened to the hum of tour groups as they buzzed over Botticelli's spring and Birth of Venus.
I saw the way life seemed often like a Carvaggio painting, with only once source of light and shadowed faces caught in one moment, the way changing my perspective means changing focal
points and releasing my own perpetual, perfectionist hold on the way scenes of my life unravel.
The experience at Florence made her more wise and replenished. She felt inspired. She knew that the best thing she would get out of this trip would be a feeling of overall inspiration and words to make herself a better writer with.
I lived in the arteries of Firenze betwixt a pumping, tour crowd covered frenzy that beat like life blood flowing through the street signed veins. Living here feels like a crescendo into the void, an
operatic aria into the unknown. Living here feels like I pour parts of my suitcase heart into places that will keep my shirts more nearly pressed than I could. I am constantly considering the "just in case" scenario I which I need to arrive to the next moment of human eternity in style. But in Rome, I have found that every day imprints itself onto the broken and coddled cobble stones of a once-upon-a-time empire. In Rome it becomes painfully obvious, one will never arrive at the next empire of humanity, and one contributes to it.
