Angelina Kuznetsova
She has colorful hair and smiles shyly. She sees the world through the lens of a camera, and she sometimes struggles to believe in herself. This is Angelina Kuznetsova, a “loyal, nervous, sometimes lost” freshman at AUBG, as she describes herself.
Angelina wants to pursue a double-major in business and psychology. Her love for numbers and her desire to better understand herself brought her to those fields. Yet, her biggest passion is photography.
When Angelina was little, her parents bought her older brother a camera. Fascinated with everything he did, Angelina wanted to be like him, so she started taking pictures as well. When her brother moved out several years later, the camera was passed on to Angelina and this is where her passion for photography began.
“Taking pictures of random strangers is my favorite thing,” Angelina says as her eyes light up. She shares most photos on her Instagram account and dreams of a career that will combine all of her passions, including the one for traveling.
Fall 2020 is Angelina’s first semester at AUBG. However, her story with this university began in the summer of 2019 when she received a ticket to the AUBG summer camp. When she arrived in Blagoevgrad, Angelina was confused. She had just realized she might not want to stay in her home country, Russia, after graduation. The camp convinced her completely that studying abroad was the thing for her.
Apart from the realization of what she wanted to do in the future, the AUBG camp gave Angelina something else. There, she met a boy who became her close friend and, after some time, her boyfriend.
“I remember how on the last day of camp we didn’t want to part ways so we decided to stay up all night,” reminisces Angelina. “I was so nervous, I went up to a resident assistant and asked if it would be okay to spend the night outside of the dorms. They laughed at me. A lot,” says Angelina with a smile on her face.
“Go on, do something crazy,” the resident assistant told her, and Angelina took this advice. She and her friend walked aimlessly until they found a field, a 30-minute walk from campus. They laid on the grass the whole night, looking at the stars. “It was freezing, but it was worth it,” Angelina says. “The sunrise in the morning was the most beautiful one I’d ever seen,” she smiles nostalgically.
Angelina and her new friend spent the rest of the summer together. In September, she had to go back to her hometown to start her last year of school. By that time, their connection had evolved into a romantic relationship. They dated long-distance for almost a year, living 1700 km away from each other. In 2020, they finally reunited at AUBG — the university that brought them together in the first place.
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Nadezhda Kaloferova is a sophomore at AUBG majoring in Journalism and Mass Communication and Political Science and International Relations. She is excited to immerse herself in the art of interviewing.
