Abby Sinclaire Wilson is a Student Ambassador from the United States who completed her Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Product Design at the University of Bologna.
Published on 20 July 2026 | North America
My name is Abby, I am American, from Fayetteville, Arkansas, and I have spent about four years in Italy between my high school exchange year and my bachelor’s degree in industrial product design here in Bologna. I have applied to the Advanced Design master’s program and am hoping to start this September. I want to stay because of the opportunities Unibo offers, and because in my program at least, students actually have a voice and it gets listened to. But also because the longer I stay in Bologna, the more I discover, and I am looking forward to deepening my relationships here, with the city, with my professors, and with the university itself.
My exchange year in high school is where I first got to know Italy. I was undecided between Milan and Bologna when it came time to choose a university, but a host sister from that year, who loved Bologna, convinced me to come even though I had never actually been. She was right. Bologna is such a warm city, it really welcomes you in, and culturally it never stops, between the music, the cinema, the markets, there is always something happening and it is genuinely hard to get bored here. As for the process itself, the bureaucracy and logistics of actually moving here were no walk in the park, but there are lots of people to help you along the way.
My bachelor’s program is quite unique in the fact that it is extremely hands on. I really enjoyed getting to collaborate with my classmates to design and build physical prototypes in our lab courses. The university approach in general is quite different than in the US, and while I can’t speak for all degree programs here, I remember feeling surprised by the long hours of our lectures, which in the US is quite atypical.
Bologna in the beginning seemed much bigger than it actually is. When you get to exploring, you learn the streets pretty quickly and realize how easy it is to make friends. My first few months here were really easy because I immediately made Italian friends who were more than willing to show me the city and all their favorite spots. Luckily, because of my exchange year, I already spoke Italian and was attending an Italian degree program, so integrating wasn’t too challenging.
My housing situation has been all over the place. For a while I moved around subletting from students who were off doing their own Erasmus semester, then I did a semester of Erasmus myself in Istanbul, and when I came back I found a house through a Facebook Marketplace listing with people I had never met before. Over these past two years they have become some of my best friends, and honestly that is the thing I would tell anyone coming here, your best friends are out there waiting for you in Bologna, you just have to go meet them.As for the city itself, Bologna is super livable. You can walk pretty much anywhere, and I personally get around by bike and have zero complaints.
I recommend Bologna endlessly, there is everything you need here to create any life you want, no matter what that looks like. If the language is a worry for you, there are ways to learn it, the university offers free language courses, and people genuinely want to help you, they get excited when you try. It comes faster than you think once you’re actually living it day to day, surrounded by it. My advice is to just stay open and try out everything that interests you, and be prepared for rainy autumns and very, very hot summers.