Tim Newberry

University of Kansas, Accounting
Summer 2015

CIMBA is not only an opportunity to progress your education but also gives you an opportunity to experience Europe on a multicultural level. CIMBA does an excellent job of giving their students the best opportunity for travel on weekends for several reasons. First, Paderno del Grappa is a rural town located 20 minutes north by bus of the closet city with a major train station, Bassano del Grappa. CIMBA offers buses during travel weekends to bring students from Paderno del Grappa to Bassano del Grappa as well as return trips on Sundays for two euros, which is by far cheaper and more efficient than any cab ride. From Bassano del Grappa, students can travel to just about any major city throughout Europe. My group and I traveled to Lake Como and Milan (Italy) the first weekend, Budapest (Hungary) on the second, and finished our third travel weekend in Barcelona (Spain).

Another benefit of travel through the CIMBA program is the wide variety of students that accompany you in the program. During the four weeks, I traveled in a group of ten students, but heard of groups as large as thirty to groups as small as two. If there is a city you want to visit, it’s pretty much safe to say that there is another student in the program that wants to visit the same city even if it’s somewhere as far away as Amsterdam or as close as Venice.Barcelona, Spain

Finally, CIMBA gives their students an excellent opportunity to travel by how they schedule their weeks. During the summer, students are in the classroom from Monday to Thursday around lunch, varying by what block schedule they have. But no matter if you’re A, B, or C block, every student is done on Thursday around lunch, which gives you three and a half days of travel on two of the weekends. This means if your group does want to travel to a city that’s farther away, such as Amsterdam, you have the ability to do so.

CIMBA was a four-week educational journey that I will never forget. My advice to any student who is lucky enough to partake in the program is to take pictures. It doesn’t matter if you’re at the university in Paderno or traveling on the weekend – just take pictures. You’ll wish you had more pictures at the end of it when you’re trying to relive the amazing experiences that occurred abroad.