Mattia
Mattia seems to live one of the most fulfilling lives that I have seen from a teenager. As we talked I constantly realized how well fleshed out of a person he is. I already knew Mattia at a surface level from having first block American History with him last semester. We sat next to eachother. I learned a lot more about Mattia today than i did that entire semester. I already knew Mattia played basketball, but I did not know that after home games, Mattia would DJ at a local club. This isn’t something you really get to do in America, but in Italy, where Mattia is an exchange student from, clubbing is legal at 16.
Mattia is a senior right now, and once he completes high school, I learned he would like to go into his Family Business which is Felicetti Pasta, but that is nowhere near all he wants to do. He would love to also be able to have golf as a hobby, and be on the board of directors of a golf club. He would like to sponsor a ski team, preferably the italian national team. He would like to be a ski instructor himself, as a part time job. He would like to get into music. He would like to get into events programming and organization, and thats why he is DJing right now, so that he can eventually own his own club. He would like to own his own basketball team.
The Family business would be his primary source of income, but he is a very passionate person, and he has a number of built out interests outside of it. He seems to have figured out what he wants in a way that I very rarely see from teenagers. A majority of my friends can barely tell me even a vague idea of what they want to do professionally. His passions extend past that too, and he has hobbies fleshed out in a way that I don’t see very often. He started building desktop computers when he was 12, and talked about different graphics cards, with him especially liking the 2070 super series by nvidia. This isn’t something I see very often from my peers, I was impressed by Mattia’s clarity in expaining all of this, and I was impressed by how passionate Mattia was while explaining each answer. They are get to know you questions for an English class, and it would be easy to phone them in, but Mattia seems to think that if he is going to do it, then why not give it his all?
With all of his willingness to try new things, and with his love for travel, he has picked up one problem though. He speaks 3 languages, and he is worried about his ability to properly express himself. Knowing 3 languages means he knows what he wants to say, but he may not know how to say it in your language, and hes been struggling with that. Even in this interview, there were a few moments where he needed me to help him with a word. He knew the concept he wanted to express, but he couldn’t really express it without help, and that is in large part because of how multilingual he is. He some amount of time speaking each language, and this means he loses out on picking up more obscure vocabulary from any individual language. I think this is a valid concern for Mattia, but honestly he is expressive enough and can convey the idea well enough that I doubt it will be a major problem.
I enjoyed my time spent speaking to Mattia, and would like to speak to him more throughout the Semester.