LA CIVETTA March 2015 | Page 16

IL DIPARTIMENTO viveras will griffiths La Civetta talked to University of Bristol Italian graduate Will Griffiths about his time at Bristol studying Italian and Viveras, the social hub he has since co-founded which helps students make the most out of their year abroad. Today Viveras has over 1000 users from countries and cities all over Europe and is growing every day. What is Viveras and what inspired you to set it up? Viveras is a venture set up by myself and my business partner, Nick Buckingham. We’re both Bristol Italian graduates – I studied French and Italian and he studied Italian and Politics. We’d both been on years abroad and we definitely felt that more could be done to help students, not just to actually go abroad but also to decide where to go, which cities to visit, where to live and, most importantly, how to become a local resident, which we thought was the most challenging thing when you arrive in a new place. You get to know all the little things in your home university, like Monday night is particularly good in one club or that certain areas of town have certain vibes, and those are the things that you don’t get when you go somewhere new. What we’re trying to do is pool all that knowledge together so that people have something they can reference before they go away and a way of keeping in touch with other people as well. “ we definitely felt that more could be done to help students, not just to actually go abroad but also to decide where to go