91�ֿ�

Walk through Lisbon, Portugal, with a typical tour group, and you’ll get a version of the story: colorful tiles, hilltop views, the Age of Discovery. What you probably won’t hear is the other history layered underneath it — one that stretches back thousands of years, carried by people whose descendants are still fighting to be recognized as citizens of the city they were born in.

That’s the story , a small nonprofit founded in the late 1990s, has spent decades trying to tell. And this past July, eight 91�ֿ� students spent four weeks helping the nonprofit tell it to a global audience.

The trip is part of a program in the College of Communication and Information’s School of Emerging Media and Technology, led by Associate Professor David E. Silva, Ph.D., and built on a long-standing exchange relationship with the . It isn’t education abroad in the usual sense — no lecture halls, no watching from a distance. Students fly to Lisbon, spend mornings in a Portuguese-language class and afternoons working on a real project for a real client, and go home with an internship credit, not a souvenir. 

Building a Web App

Silva didn’t set out to build a multiyear program. A few years ago, 91�ֿ�’s partner in Lisbon needed help. Batoto Yetu Portugal had built real credibility on the ground — walking tours, tuk-tuk tours and storytellers who could talk for hours about the history most visitors never hear about. What it didn’t have was a way to reach anyone before visitors physically showed up.

“They’ve got people telling the stories and engaging with folks all the time,” Silva said. “But how they live virtually and how they share that story beyond — they’ve had some trouble with wayfinding. So somebody maybe can’t book a tour, what do they do instead?”

91�ֿ� sent its first group of 14 students in 2024. A second team continued the work from the Kent Campus during the 2025 Spring Semester. This July, eight students went to Lisbon to finish what the earlier teams started: that walks users through a timeline of African history in Portugal, anchored by an original character the students designed, voiced and coded from scratch. 

Each group has had to start by catching up on everything the last one learned. The first group didn’t have that luxury.

“We didn’t know anything about Lisbon, about Portugal, about our partner,” Silva said of that first year. “That first group of students that went really set the foundation for how we do this type of project.” 

The Client Doesn’t Grade on a Curve

For Madeline Moliterno, a senior from Austintown, Ohio, majoring in emerging media and technology with a user experience minor, the hardest adjustment wasn’t the country. It was the client.

“Your client doesn’t know exactly how to do it, and that’s why they’re asking you to,” Moliterno said. “So when they say, ‘Hey, I want this and this,’ it’s all on you.”

That pressure pushed her into tools she’d never used in a live project.  

“I feel like it allowed me to get a broader perspective of that for my future career in web design, development, even user experience,” she said.

Will Russo, of Stow, Ohio, a senior visual communication design major with a user experience minor, had never worked alongside other designers before this trip. He had only worked solo on his own assignments. In Lisbon, he was suddenly one of several.  

“Everyone works differently, and everyone has their own way of doing things,” he said. “Being able to overcome those challenges and find a middle ground of where we can all work and have this work efficiently was really just a great opportunity.”

Lindsey Rhoads, a senior visual communication design major from Alliance, Ohio, ended up somewhere she’d never expected: running social strategy. While most of the group built the website, Rhoads and another student built Batoto Yetu Portugal something the nonprofit could use long after the students went home.  

“We got to make not only a bunch of templates for them to use, but we also got to build them a marketing plan,” Rhoads said. “I think it just gives them a good baseline to be able to go forward with.”

That back-and-forth with the client, Silva said, is the part a classroom can’t replicate.

“Presenting something to a partner, having them give you some hard critique, you need to go back to a team and have that conversation, see what to change, see what to hold on to,” Silva said. “That often doesn’t happen in a classroom because you submit something, it’s a grade and then it’s done.” 

Strangers at the Airport

Rhoads missed the predeparture meeting, so the first time she met any of her classmates was at the gate.  

“There were eight of us who went, eight students, and I had actually never met any of them before we went,” she said. “I met everybody at the airport.”

Four weeks later, that had changed completely.  

“We went from being complete strangers to feeling like I have a group of lifelong friends now,” Rhoads said. “It was really awesome.”

Moliterno had chosen the program specifically because a full semester abroad felt like too much to commit to. Four weeks felt right.  

“I got the experience of living in a different country but not committing to that country so wholeheartedly that I get super homesick,” she said. “The month was just perfect because we got enough time to work on a project and bond with each other, but also not commit to my whole summer being there.”

Silva has watched that bonding happen for three years now, and this summer’s group included several students who had never left Ohio before.

“We had a group of brand-new students, brand-new travelers — had never been on a plane before,” he said. “Having a group to experience all of those changes and then work through and reflect and be in conversation, I think that was a huge benefit to me as an instructor, to get to watch these students go through something brand new. The closeness and bonding of this group was something really special to see.” 

Not Just Any Education Abroad

The students kept coming back to the same distinction: This wasn’t an education-abroad trip that happened to include a project. It was an internship that happened to be in Lisbon.

“A lot of colleges promote studying abroad,” Moliterno said. “And when you look at studying abroad, it’s, oh, you get to have classes in this country. And that’s a phenomenal experience. But what made this unique to 91�ֿ� is the internship, the hands-on and the partnerships that we have. Being able to say you went on an internship is unique and very big for a portfolio.”

Rhoads credited the university’s institutional relationship with the Catholic University of Portugal for making that possible in the first place.  

“I think the uniqueness for 91�ֿ� was the partnership that they have — getting to do not just studying abroad for a semester but getting that hands-on, real experience,” she said.

Russo, who came in partly to finally meet two online friends from Portugal he’d made earlier, ended up just as invested in the professional side of the trip — and in the fact that it isn’t a one-time arrangement.  

“We have a long-standing relationship with them,” he said of Batoto Yetu Portugal. “And I’m happy to say that after our project this year, we’re continuing that relationship.”

Silva was equally clear that the program doesn’t require a specific major to join. This year’s group included a music composition major who signed up for the trip because it sounded interesting and ended up composing original drum tracks and creating sound design for the team’s social content.  

“This is open to any student who wants to start the experience,” Silva said. 

What Comes Back With Them

Moliterno already has a theory for what all of this adds up to after graduation.

“91�ֿ� and especially this program made me more employable because of the connections I made,” she said. “Just having the experience of working with a partnership that is in another country that has different experiences than you and knows more about something you don’t know and vice versa.”

Silva sees the same thing from the faculty side, framed a little differently: fewer surprises.  

“This is a really unique opportunity for students to do that work with an actual potential client, with real-world limitations, with kind of the messiness of being in international work,” he said. “It’s one of the best experiences a student can have — to come back for another couple of semesters with that aha moment of, oh, here’s what the work is actually like.”

Silva is hoping to grow the program further, possibly branching a second group into a new partner organization through the Catholic University of Portugal’s network — maybe even outside Lisbon entirely.

For now, the students who spent July building an app are back in Kent, a few credits closer to graduation, texting a group chat that outlasted the trip itself.

“I’ve made lifelong friends from this trip,” Russo said.

Silva sees that as inseparable from the professional outcome, not a footnote to it. Watching that group work through the disorientation of an unfamiliar country, an actual client and each other’s very different working styles — and come out the other side with what he expects to be “lifelong friendships as well as really productive portfolios” — was, in his words, one of the best parts of teaching it.

That combination — a résumé line that reads “internship,” not “education abroad”; a portfolio piece built for an actual client with actual stakes; and a group of collaborators who taught each other as much as any professor did — is what students keep coming back to when they try to explain why this mattered. As Moliterno put it, plenty of colleges will tell you that you get to take classes in a beautiful city. Few will hand you a real client and a real deadline and trust you to deliver.