By Spencer DeVilliers
As an engineering major in my third year of college, I knew that I would need to get an internship over the summer. It would help give me experience and make connections for a job in the future. I reached out to many companies, but one stood out as particularly interesting. This company was called Delta Systems, and it was a company that would design assembly lines for brands that needed them, such as Nestlé or Kellogg’s. I thought it would be a simple and easy design job, but when I went in for an interview, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the company was actually owned by a parent company called IMA. This is an Italian company known as Industriale Meccaniche Automatiche, and they oversee mechanical design systems all over the world. Not only did it help my interview to say that I was an Italian student, but some of the chief officers of the company were fluent in or learning to speak Italian. It was a wonderful opportunity to combine my engineering work with my ability to speak conversational Italian, and it gave me time to practice speaking even when I wasn’t actively taking a class. I think it greatly helped me in becoming more comfortable with speaking Italian, and was an experience that I wll never forget!
Spencer DeVilliers is an active member and Treasurer of the University of Arkansas’s Italian Club and a participant in the Fulbright Language Contest. He has embraced opportunities to bring Italian into both his academic and professional experiences.