Alison Thompson
Alison Thompson is an American studying at AUBG as a freshman. She is 26 years old and is a former Marine sergeant. She has been in the U.S. Marines Corps for eight years and has decided one day to go to an American university in Bulgaria in order to get a degree. “There was a point where I just kinda felt like I was in a rut a little bit. Not necessarily with my progress as a person, but my progress as in the Marines corps. I wasn’t being challenged, I had kinda beat all of the standards,” Alison said.
Her time in the Marines was great. “The shittiest moments were probably the most fun ones, looking back on it now,” Alison said. But after eight years, she closed that amazing chapter of her life in order to begin a new one, here at AUBG. “I’m a huge believer of once you’ve opened a chapter and you’ve put an end to it, don’t dwell on it,” she said.
She has travelled a lot, from living four years in Japan, running a marathon in China, going to Korea, living in California and also being deployed in Irak as a mechanic for nine months. Even though she felt like she’d been everywhere already, Bulgaria is a totally new experience for her. Everything is different from what she expected and according to her, culture shock is definitely an understatement.
Alison is easily recognizable by her fifteen tattoos on her body. “My most important ones are my chest piece and my leg piece,” she said. Her chest piece is related to the happiest moments of her life, being on the water with her family during the summer when she was young. The tattoo she has on her leg is a sentence from one of her favorite books which is “Born to run”. She got it before running a 100-mile marathon.
Her biggest fear is — math. She actually had to withdraw from the class and it’s becoming a real issue. “I know that sounds really silly but there is a huge possibility that because I’m not good at math, I could possibly not graduate from this university,” Alison said. She is a very goal-oriented person and when she gets her mind on something, she is going to do everything that is in her power to get it done.
After graduation, Alison plans on following the example of her anthropology teacher, professor Nadezhda Savova-Grigorova, who runs a community program called “Bread Houses International Network”. “She is the most amazing woman I’ve ever met in my entire life. She is a serious role model,” she said. The goal of this bread making therapeutic approach is to get people together and to talk about things. Alison would like to do use it to aid veterans and people who suffer from severe PTSD.
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Audrey Kestens came to AUBG as an Eramsus student to study JMC and is from Belgium
