PUERTO RICO
GREECE
KYRGYZSTAN
THAILAND
GREECE
As a child, a C-SC student or in her job, Abbi Frings remains passionate about living abroad
ORLD
AROU
WASHINGTON D.C.
H E T W D N
THAILAND
KYRGYZSTAN
Wanderlust runs in the family of alumna Abbi Frings ’15, who believes she was born to travel – a desire seemingly inherited from her mother, Deborah Owen. “Mom definitely has the travel bug. She likes to say the first time I was on a plane was when I was three weeks old,” Frings said. Frings has been passionate about seeing the world since she lived with a host family in Spain at the age of 15, an experience that would lead to a lifelong passion for travel and exploring other cultures. She knew that when it came time to choose where to continue her education, a school would need to prioritize domestic and international travel as part of the curriculum in order to catch her eye. It was volleyball that opened the door to Frings considering C-SC, but the Travel Study Grant program, where students have an opportunity to accrue up to $1,500 in institutional support for their studies abroad, is what hooked her. When Caren Kemner, the C-SC women’s volleyball coach at the time, contacted Frings during her senior season about an opportunity to continue playing, the college’s investment in study abroad and emphasis on international education helped solidify her choice to leave her hometown of Champaign, Ill., for Canton, Mo. “I know a lot of larger state schools have really well-established study abroad programs for a semester length, but I thought Culver-Stockton
was really unique and clearly devoted to ensuring all of its students have an opportunity to study abroad in some context, even if it’s just for that shorter amount of time,” she said. “I really appreciated that, and I appreciated that Culver-Stockton itself invested financially in helping to get those students abroad.” Frings, who majored in international studies and political science, traveled to Cuba and Belize during her time at C-SC and also made trips to Chicago and Louisiana. She spearheaded the creation and implementation of a bilateral exchange agreement between Culver-Stockton and the Universidad de Cantabria in Santander, Spain, to promote semester study-abroad trips. Frings says during her time at Culver-Stockton College, she learned to be an ambassador for the United States and beyond. “I learned how to appropriately represent myself as an American, as a student and as a person while abroad,” she said. “I learned how to conduct myself in a professional way, which really has translated to what I do.” Through all of her travels, both domestic and international, it was a trip to Cuba during her freshman year that wins the spot of Fring’s most memorable experience. “We went for education reasons, but you couldn’t go to Cuba recreationally as a tourist at that point in time,” she said. “It really felt like uncharted territory. It was awesome and interesting.” In a way that only a small midwestern town can, Frings believes her time living in Canton helped broaden her views. She is especially appreciative of Dr. Chad DeWaard, a professor in political science, who served as a sort of sounding board while she was adjusting to life surrounded by people with different ideas,
backgrounds and communication styles from her upbringing. “I don’t know a time that we’ve been so divided as a country, but I think what I learned at Culver-Stockton is that it’s OK to disagree with people, but you still fundamentally need to treat them with respect on a human level in spite of our differences,” she said. “I’m from Champaign, which is a really liberal city, and now I’m in Washington, D.C., a major urban area. Coming to a generally more conservative environment was a new experience for me. It definitely opened up my perspective on things that I didn’t want to know about or previously agreed with and made me realize that, hey, you know what, I don’t know everything.” Frings’ mother is a minister for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), which selected Frings to serve as a member of the church board while she was a student. A truly unique educational experience, Frings travelled to participate in board meetings where she witnessed the decision-making process first-hand as the direction of the church and its future goals were discussed. Frings graduated in December 2016, so she took time to – what else? – travel, visiting Spain, China, Thailand and Malaysia with her mother. It was during that post-graduation time when, thanks to help from a cousin who also works in the international development sector, she discovered a career that meshed her academic background with her travel desires. Now, just five years after her graduation from C-SC, Frings is a project operations analyst for the international development division at Abt Associates in Washington, D.C., and travels world-wide as she manages startups and closeouts for international projects. Abt is a contractor for the U.S. government, and Frings often is the director of projects awarded to
Abt. One of the largest clients Frings works with is the United States Agency for International Development. “As you can see from my career trajectory and my life, going abroad and being in an international context is really important to me,” she said. “The best perspective we can get on ourselves as a country is from examining through a lens of another country, another culture. The fact that Culver-Stockton financially and curriculum-wise was invested in a student’s ability to go abroad was just awesome.” In the context of making change domestically and abroad, Frings has had the opportunity to work on transformational projects during her
CULVER-STOCKTON’S COMMITMENT TO GETTING STUDENTS ABROAD AND GIVING THEM EXPERIENCES ON THEIR OWN IS SO INVALUABLE. IT’S NOT SOMETHING THAT CAN BE TRADED.
tenure at Abt. One project that sticks out in her mind was when she helped direct a $209 million project to combat the spread of HIV in Mozambique. On this project, Fring’s duties on the operational and finance side were to register Abt as a business in Mozambique, hire subcontractors, work with the local government and help recruit and hire local employees. “I am particularly proud of that project,” Frings said. “I remember being really intimidated and sitting on the plane and being like, ‘What am I getting myself into?’ We really don’t even have our field team on the ground yet. We don’t have any offices. I don’t know if I’m really that prepared to do the work that needs to get done. This project just seemed particularly daunting, given the size and the urgency. There was a lot of intense pressure to make this project successful. “It is now very successful, not just because of me. We had a phenomenal team. All of us were working 12-to-14 hour days, and I was there for five weeks, so that was a pretty intense project. But I’m really proud of it. I’m proud of the people we selected to be part of the team, because they’re such good people who were devoted to the success of the project.” Additional initiatives Frings has worked on include closing a project in Kyrgyzstan to combat the spread of tuberculosis, planning budgets for the promotion and expansion of clean energy in Thailand, and financially auditing a project to support local health systems in the Dominican Republic. “We’re really investing in economies so the countries can become stronger on
their own,” she said. “Once we leave those countries and the project is over, the countries must have the appropriate resources to maintain whatever benefit we were providing by being there.” Frings says she is considering a career in human rights reform, and she is applying for graduate school and for a Fulbright scholarship that would allow her to study abroad. She still believes that experience is the best way to help someone choose what they want to do with their life. “It is one thing to learn something in a lecture and hear it disseminated, but it is another thing to actually experience it yourself,” she said. “Culver-Stockton’s commitment to getting students abroad and giving them experiences on their own is so invaluable. It’s not something that can be traded. Those experiences not only set you up for success in your career but also give you an opportunity to expand your perspective in a way that you wouldn’t get just by sitting in a classroom.”