Student of the Month: Elisabetta Dosi By Ryan McGahan
American high school is mythologized in TV and movies the world over, and it can be daunting for foreign students. You could excuse Elisabetta Dosi, a junior at St. Petersburg High School, for feeling out of place since moving here from La Spezia, Italy in 2019. That’s far from the case. In addition to her regular studies, Dosi’s volunteered at the St. Petersburg Museum of History, distributing pamphlets, sifting through documents, archiving and helping to plan new exhibits. The museum, coincidentally, is run by her history teacher, Rui Farias. “But that’s not how I got involved in the museum,” she explains. “I was looking for volunteering opportunities, and I just kind of emailed this museum because I was like, ‘Oh, a museum of the history of St. Pete – that’s so cool.’ I just emailed it and then Mrs. Trewin, my art teacher, told me, ‘Oh yeah, Mr. Farias told me that you asked to volunteer at his museum’, and I was like, completely clueless,” she said, laughing. She’s since settled in, however, it took her some time to adjust to taking classes in the U.S. “When I first came here, my En-
ELISABETTA DOSI
“Student of the Month” is a feature highlighting some of our area’s brightest young minds, what they’re doing and where they’re going. Know a student you think deserves a mention? Email news@thegabber. com.
glish was really, really bad,” she said. “The first day of school, I was just not understanding anything of what the teachers were saying. I was just
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completely lost. The one thing that helped me was a teacher that spoke Italian for some reason, [Mrs. Bosco].” Dosi found her Spanish classes easier than her English-language ones, thanks to the three years of Spanish she had already taken in Italy. “School in Italy is kind of, not harder, but like, they give so much work. So like in three years of middle school studying Spanish, you’re most likely to be fluent already,” she said. Aside from the language barrier, she’s noticed a number of major differences in the school system compared to back home – like the fact that American high school ends
theGabber.com | May 20, 2021 - May 26, 2021
