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Oosterhout ’17 Spends Senior Year Studying Abroad
Italy has captivated Olivia Oosterhout ever since her freshman year, when she traveled there with St. Andrew’s during spring break.
“I completely fell in love with the country, its culture, its language, and its food. I knew that I needed to go back,” she said.
While some students might have planned for a summer trip or semester abroad in college, Oosterhout couldn’t wait to return, and decided to spend her senior year studying in Italy.
“I wanted the chance to become fluent in the language, create strong relationships with people all over the world, and immerse myself fully in the culture, and I knew that only two months would not be enough for me,” she said.
Since last August, Oosterhout has lived with a host family just outside of Viterbo, a small city north of Rome. She takes classes through School Year Abroad, a program that offers international study experiences in Italy, Spain, China, and France, where her brother studied during his junior year.
“I have always been the type of person who strives to expand her comfort zone, try something she's never done before, challenge herself in new ways, or do something that scares her because I truly believe that's how I can better myself as a person,” Oosterhout said. “SYA has a similar mindset, so it seemed like a really good fit for me.”
In addition to taking classes, Oosterhout has traveled extensively throughout Italy, having already visited Padova, Ravenna, Bologna, Venice, Trieste, Sicily and Pompeii. She has taken advantage of opportunities to experience Italian culture and traditions firsthand—shortly after she arrived, she attended the Festival of Santa Rosa, when Italians watch 100 men carry a 30-meter high tower lit with 300 candles through the very narrow streets and squares of Viterbo’s medieval town center.
“It is an amazing event that has no equivalent in America, so for me, it was a really huge cultural shift in my first days with SYA,” she said.
Oosterhout credits much of her success in Italy to what she’s learned at St. Andrew’s. The school’s emphasis on writing has helped her excel on English assignments, and her Latin classes enabled her to quickly master Italian, she said.
The greatest challenge St. Andrew’s prepared her for while abroad, Oosterhout said, is getting into college.
“Every senior struggles with the college process, but St. Andrew's prepared me so well that it really was not a ‘huge’ deal for me,” she said. “[Denard] Jones, who was my college counselor, always kept the lines of communication between us open, even before I left, so that I would not feel like I was alone in this process. I ended up getting accepted into every college I applied to, including my [early decision], and there's no way I could have done that without St. Andrew's.”
Oosterhout will return to Maryland at the end of May—just in time to graduate from St. Andrew’s in June—and will attend Occidental College in Los Angeles this fall.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal School is a private, coeducational college preparatory day school for students in preschool (Age 2) through grade 12, located in Potomac, Maryland.