Three years ago I was a freshman in college and one day I saw a sign in the food court about an internship to work at Disney World. It piqued my interest, so a couple weeks later I went to the meeting. I went there not expecting much; I figured there had to be some sort of catch that the signs and the website didn’t mention. After learning all of the information about it I became really interested in applying for it, but I didn’t want to do the program in Florida because I’ve been there a million times. Everyone told me I was stupid for not doing the one in Florida, but they didn't get it. Why should I stay in Florida when I can go somewhere new? I applied for the one at Disneyland because I wanted to go to California, and it was a perfect way to already have a place to live and a job upon getting there. I didn’t really take the interview seriously the first time and got rejected, which wasn’t really a big deal to me because I had just applied on a whim the day of the presentation without really preparing for it.
The following semester, I registered for Beginning Italian 1 about a week before classes started to fill up my schedule. The class was supposed to have some woman teaching it, but the night before the semester started I got an email telling me that the class would be taught by Emanuele Pettener instead of the woman because something happened (or something like that; I don’t really remember). I checked his reviews on ratemyprofessors and they said he was from Italy, and I figured that was probably a good thing because at least I’d be learning from a native speaker. So when class started the next day he walked in speaking only Italian and it was kind of intimidating, but after studying for a few days I started to take to the language pretty easily. The grammar never seemed extremely complex to me, and even when I didn’t know the vocabulary my grammar knowledge could usually bail me out on the exams. I originally took the class to fulfill my foreign language requirement so I didn’t care how I did in it as long as I got at least a B-. I ended up getting an A. That same semester I saw signs again for the Disney College Program so I decided to apply again and take it a little more seriously. Since I was more prepared for it, I got to do two interviews with them, but my downfall was that I used your stock, generic responses to the questions because I wasn't totally comfortable with being myself while on the phone with a stranger. On questions such as, “Why do you want to work for us?” I told them because it’s a great company; it would look good on my resume, etc. Two weeks later I got a letter in the mail telling me I didn’t get accepted. "California will just have to wait," I thought, so I signed up for Intermediate Italian with Professor Serra.
I was a bit nervous about taking Italian with a different professor because I was used to the other professor’s teaching style and I understood everything really well in his class. I don’t think I started off on the right foot with her either, as I always forgot to do my homework early on. However, a few weeks into the semester I got in the groove and started doing better so I guess I got on her good side a little bit. I’d say that she’s probably my favorite professor now, evidenced by the fact that in four semesters I’ve taken five of her classes. Anyway, one day I went to her office to get some information about the study abroad program in Venice and I told her that I was interested in going but that I was going to apply for the Disney thing again before signing up for the Venice program. This time I applied on the first day they took applications, and when I did my interview I totally kicked ass and thought I was a lock to get the job. A few weeks later I got an email saying that they were further reviewing my application and that I would know by December 19th, 2011. I pretty much took that to mean that I was denied again, but as the months went by I saw on Facebook that some of the people who got the same email ended up getting the job so I still had a little hope. A week before Christmas I got a letter telling me that I didn’t get in again. This time I was really upset about it because at that point it wasn’t just something I was interested in anymore, it was a quest (“A quest for fun! We're all gonna have so much fucking fun we'll need plastic surgery to remove our goddamn smiles! You'll be whistling Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah out of your assholes!” – Clark Griswold). A couple days later I signed up for two more Italian classes. This had become a yearly thing, I’d get rejected by Disney and then I’d sign up for an Italian class.
Anyway, by this time it was the Spring 2012 semester and I had signed up for the study abroad program in Venice this past summer. I was pissed off a lot that semester because I really wanted to go to California. Then my brother decided he was going to go to Disneyland, of course, so I had to hear about him going there as well. I was so pissed that when my brother asked me if I wanted to go with him I said no and decided to be angry by myself while waiting to take off for Italy. While I was busy being pissed off, I also managed to piss off other people (so it wasn’t a total loss, right?). I promise I’ll get to the point of this soon....
So now let’s fast forward to July 3, 2012, where I’m sitting in a hotel room in Milan, Italy writing this. My short semester in Venice ended nine days ago, and I had a lot of fun, met a lot of new people, and learned a lot of things. I also stopped being so angry at the fact that for the last three years I’ve been denied the one thing I’ve wanted the most. Never mind the fact that the eighteen-year-old Reese probably would not have been ready to move across the country by himself; I can look back now at where those rejections led me. Maybe it’s just coincidence, or maybe there’s some sort of cosmic plan that the universe has in store for me, but being rejected allowed me to keep studying Italian, and it went from being just a one-off class to fulfill a requirement to now being my major (also due in large part to taking classes with the two best professors at FAU). I wouldn't say I'm totally fluent in Italian, but when I go out I can communicate with people and more or less understand what they say, and I can even watch movies in Italian and understand what’s happening. And while getting rejected all those times kept me from moving across the country, I ended up traveling across the world for two months. I even got to visit Disneyland Paris. In retrospect, I was able to learn another language and travel across Europe in the wake of extreme disappointment. I don’t know why I never got the job, but that's just the way it went. Looking back, I’m not so upset about it now.
I don’t know where my adventures will take me in the future, but I’m sure that I’ll find my way back to Italy one day. I might never go back to Venice, but I hope to at least go back to Italy one day. It may not be next year, five years from now, or ten years from now, but I’ll be back. In a couple of months I’m going to apply for the Disney job again, and hopefully this time I'll finally get to California. And if not, I can always sign up for another Italian class.
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