• Question: From your education section on your CV, it sounds like you've been travelling loads! Was that a specific decision you made to travel or did it just happen like that?

    Asked by spacefan226 to Andrea on 21 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Andrea Boyd

      Andrea Boyd answered on 21 Jun 2016:

      Specific just for the first trip then that opened up lots of ideas and I had friends to visit!

      It started because my Mum is Italian and when we visited our grandparents for lunch every Sunday my brothers and I had no idea what they were saying (they lived in Australia but didn’t speak English) so I wanted to talk to them and decided to go away as an exchange student for a year to Italy.

      In Year 10/11 I was in Italy (age 15 & 16) and over there I made friends with lots of Italians of course plus other exchange students from different countries. Then when I was 18 I did a Europe trip to visit all of them and actually I went to school for a day or two in all of their countries too! At the end of that trip I’d organised a summer job in Russia because I was curious to know what it was like there. (That started with my Mum suggesting it might be fun to work at summer camps in the USA and I wasn’t keen but I looked up their website and saw it had USA and Russia so I shouted Mum!! I’m going to apply for Russia! And she said.. hmmm… ok. I’ll help you. We’ll tell your dad later 😉 ) After that it was a constant cycle of working in Australia and saving money for my next overseas trip, going overseas, coming home to study/work&save again etc 🙂 All of the space industry was outside Australia so I knew I needed experience overseas to figure out where to work later. Plus I applied for some other jobs and internships overseas and on the ship and volunteered with the international space group from the UN and did another student exchange (like Erasmus) to study university in South Korea and won some awards/scholarships to help pay for trips too. And lots of space conferences in different countries. So from life/work/study I have friends in almost every country in the world.

      I didn’t always win scholarships/awards – I applied for so many things that I missed out on, but I kept applying and won some of them in later years or won different ones. You can’t win them all, but you have to try. It definitely helped financially! As a student doing afterschool jobs the pay rate was dreadful so it took forever to save for plane fares and all my savings went to that – I never had the latest phone or clothes like my friends – I lived for world experiences instead.

      And now I live in Europe! Crazy good budget airfares like Ryanair and Easyjet. AND you can drive to a ton of countries, which is just bizarre for my brain still…. In Australia the closest city to mine was 8ish hours drive one way if you didn’t stop. You could drive for 5hours and still be in the same State! 🙂 Here in Cologne I can pick a direction, drive for an hour and be in Belgium, Netherlands, France, Luxembourg… Amazing.

Comments

  • Photo: spacefan226

    spacefan226 commented on :

    Oh my word, I never thought of Europe being like that! What would you say the best thing about moving around, travelling has been? (Apart from just variety 🙂 )

    • Photo: Andrea

      Andrea commented on :

      Seeing my friends, going to their birthdays and weddings etc – most of all just experiencing their country and pretending to be a local and hanging out with friends because we live in different countries and we don’t get to see each other very often. Picking up enough words of the language to fake a conversation at the supermarket checkout and doing normal things like that with my friends who live there 🙂 I’ve never been a tourist or been anywhere I didn’t know someone who lived there..
      My best friend is pretty much like me – we also follow each other around the world and visit the country that the other person lives in – for example he visited Korea when I lived there and I visited Mongolia and we went to Africa and various countries in Europe together – this month he moved to Kiribati (yeah, I had to look it up on googlemaps too) and he’ll work there for one year so it is very very high on my ‘to-visit’ list for next year! Now I just have to find some cheap airfares….