Initial Contact

On May 18, I found out that I was accepted into the ICISP short term international exchange program. A few weeks later, I received a letter with contact information for my exchange partner. His name is Immanuel and he is a 23-year old IT support person at the University of Applied Sciences Northwest Switzerland in Basel.

I couldn't be happier as I am a graphic designer and Swiss design has been a big influence on my own work as well as in the history of design. Furthermore, the Basel School of Design is where influential designers like April Greiman studied. And it was Basel teachers like Wolfgang Weingart who inspired Greiman to jump start the post-modern graphic design movement in the USA.

I wrote Immanuel an email introducing my wife and I along with photos and links. Immanuel responded telling us that he lives in "big" Basel as the city is split in two by the Rhine. His English is very good, but he told us that in Switzerland there are four "official" spoken languages: Swiss-German, Italian, French and Rhaeto-Romanic. Since Basel is located in the Swiss-German part, everybody will be speaking German despite the big difference between Swiss-German and German. I guess, I better brush up on my German.

In Immanuel's application, he mentioned liking movies, art, music and travel. One of his goals is to see other IT departments in the USA and how they deal with complex situations. Based on that information and several email exchanges, we agreed to a rough itinerary. Immanuel responded positively to the itinerary and specifically mentioned being excited by going to a drive-in movie (unfortunately the Harvest Moon closes on September 30) and going to Chicago. He is also planning to go to New York City for a week after the exchange.