I think you have a little bit of everything here at Appalachian. We have unbelievable teachers here. If you’re an outdoorsy person, there’s so much to do with all the rivers, lakes and mountains. Nobody can get bored here.

Appalachian’s got a great risk management and insurance program — one of the top in the country. Insurance companies from all over the Southeast come to our insurance career fair, held every semester, to recruit. I think that’s a big benefit to a lot of students. I don’t think risk management and insurance is a major that a lot of students come to university planning to take, but then I think once they see the job opportunities and how well they pay plus the opportunity for advancement, it becomes a very attractive major.

If you are a student and you’re thinking of coming to the Walker College of Business, I would recommend getting involved with some sort of club related to your field of interest. That probably is a quicker way to learn about the field than taking the classes because you get to hear guest speakers talk about what they do, not read about it in a book.

Most of the student clubs are $20 to $40 a semester to join. Some of them are free. But you earn that money back very, very quickly. For example, the Risk Management & Insurance Society has a resumé book that goes out and, in my freshman year, I was in it. I was a freshman and I didn’t think I had much to offer — my resumé’s about this big [holds two fingers close together] and I’m getting calls and emails from companies offering me summer job opportunities.

If I could start over, I would probably major in international business … maybe because the most fun things I’ve done here at Appalachian have had an international aspect to them — foreign language classes that I really enjoyed, my semester abroad and, now, the Holland Fellows Program [for Business Study in Asia]. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve seen a lot of my friends get awesome jobs in the area of international business after graduating from the Walker College of Business.

After high school, I went to Australia for a few weeks and discovered that I really liked traveling. I was actually going to play football when I came to college but my decision to study abroad was one of the reasons that I didn’t go with the football. So, in my sophomore year, I studied in Salzburg, Austria which is on the western border of Austria, right near Germany … only maybe 50 miles from Munich.

When I found out I was going to Austria — they speak German there — I decided that I would take a German class. I thought it was going to be terrible and I was not looking forward to studying the language at all. But I ended up really liking it. I worked hard at it because I knew it was something I was going to need. So I was, like, "Okay, I really need to learn this." I took my time with it and actually really got into it. By the time I left Austria I was semi-conversational — that was really pretty cool.

Salzburg was unbelievably beautiful and clean and a nice size — about 150,000 people. I had classes Monday through Thursday. But I got a EuroRail Pass while I was there and traveled with friends on the 3-day weekends. We toured England, Spain, France, Italy and eastern Europe. A lot of people worry about the anti-Americanism — but we didn’t experience much of that at all, even in countries where people think we have a bad reputation, like France. I was treated great there. It was a really, really great experience. I’d definitely recommend it to anybody.

After I got over to Austria, several of the classes that I was registered for were cancelled. So I was only going to get 6 hours of credit while I was there and I couldn’t afford to do that. Well it turns out that the college has its own Academic Advising Center, which is really beneficial to students. I was able to get in touch with an advisor here and she got me approved for some new classes. It was amazing and I was so thankful to her for that. Even with only 1 major and maybe a minor, you have your prerequisites and your core curriculum and it can get kind of confusing. But the advisors here at Walker College make it easy to understand. So it’s really easy on us students and we can focus on our coursework.

For the Holland Fellows Program, we have a class that covers some Chinese history and Chinese business etiquette plus we work on a project. We’re also learning the Chinese language and that’s going kind of slow. But it’s interesting. I really like it. I’m hoping to pick it up more this summer — I’ll be staying in China, working for the summer with our connection at China Daily. So that should be really cool and a good chance to pick up some of the language.

Our counterparts from Fudan University in China have already arrived. Our group really meshed well with them. We all got to be friends and got to know each other. We got to hang out outside of class. They were very different from us in a lot of ways. But then we really started to notice their individual personalities. Some were very conservative and some were a little more liberal. In just the way they expressed themselves, some were more reserved and some were more outgoing. Some of them had more in common with some of us than they did with their Chinese friends. They were so much fun and we’ve begun some great friendships.

We’ll be leaving for China in a few weeks and I’m really excited. We’ll visit Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and then 2 other provinces. But it’s the experience that you’re getting that’s important and, you know, the opportunity to work with the Chinese people. In business, in every single class — it doesn’t matter if it’s accounting or marketing or finance, whatever — you, at some point, will hear about China. So I think all business students jump at this kind of opportunity.