Third-years plan to use trip in thesis
Two honors college students took to the highway this summer for a once in a lifetime experience. Beginning their journey in Charlotte N.C., they traveled through Florida to Louisiana, Texas, Arizona and California.
Third-year accounting and sport and entertainment management student Emily Andreoli and third-year marketing and finance student Ellie Gray thought of the idea for a cross-country road trip in their first year at USC.
“We were roommates freshman year,” Gray said. “We really wanted to take a road trip and have an excuse to talk to people and meet people along the way.”
Now, two years later, the girls made the trip a reality. For them, the month-long journey was more than just a trip across the country. They also documented their journey with a variety of pictures, videos, and a documentary consisting of interviews of people they met on their travels.
“The documentary is about people’s different definitions of success,” Gray said. “The questions we asked people centered around success. We thought success was a great way to get what people are most passionate about.”
All of their documentation can be found on their blog, Chasing Pavements. Though there were challenges in keeping up with their site, the process was rewarding, Andreoli said.
“We tried to post videos every couple of days of where we were and the interviews,” Andreoli said. “It was a lot harder than we expected because we had to edit the videos and find Wi-Fi to upload them but we were having such a great time and learning a lot of things so it was nice to share it with everyone who wanted to keep
in touch with us.”
Though Gray and Andreoli note the importance of studying abroad, they stressed the importance of also seeing what the United States has to offer in a USC release.
“Everyone puts an emphasis on study abroad and the international experience – which we agree with — but there’s so much in America that we have and people take that for granted,” Gray said. “I’m from Chicago and I’ve never been out West. Yesterday was the first time that I got to put my feet in the Pacific Ocean.”
No matter how far away the two girls were from USC, they always managed to find USC support in each city they traveled to.
“We had so many USC connections across the country,” Andreoli said. “They would help us out with lodging even though they had never met us. We would spot Gamecock gear on people and then stop and ask them about the College World Series.”
After traveling to 26 cities, Gray expressed how much she learned throughout her journey.
“I learned how to be self sufficient,” Gray said. “Even in college, you have a meal plan and everyone is around and you don’t have to worry about things too much on your own. We had to go into these new cities and figure out how to budget effectively.”
Andreoli said she inadvertently learned about a wide variety of topics during the month long trip.
“I think we had this habit of getting on these random topics and getting really in depth into them with people,” Andreoli said. “And I just realized I have all this random knowledge that I picked up from those conversations.”
Although back at home, Gray stated that this isn’t the end of the journey.
“We plan to continue posting stuff on the website,” Gray said. “We also hopefully want to be able to incorporate this into our Honors thesis.”