My Best Friend {Part 1}

I thought I'd switch things up a bit and do a post all about my fiance, Andy! This post was sparked by us meeting with our pastor this past week to discuss our upcoming wedding. He asked us a few questions about how we met and I thought it'd be fun to recap it on the blog.

Rewind a few years to March 2008; I was in my second year of college and headed to Italy for a spring break trip with the art department.

The entire trip was absolutely amazing--seeing all of the attractions, tasting the food, and photographing all of it!

Little did I know, Andy was actually in Italy that same week! He and his brother decided to take a trip to Italy on a whim. Andy and I didn't end up meeting until that June.

At the end of the semester that I went to Italy, I took one of my final capstone design courses as an accelerated 5-week intensive course instead of waiting until the fall to complete it as a 16-week course in hopes to land an internship early. One of the course requirements was to polish our portfolio so that during the last week of the class, we could participate in mock interviews. 

It was during that final week of class that I started to get a little nervous about not having an internship yet. One evening, I received an invitation on Facebook to join my college's "Art + Design Alumni" group. I immediately joined and started adding design alumni to my friends list so that I could network with them in hopes of interning at a design firm.

Andy was one of the people that I sent a friend request to and I was surprised when he responded with a message back so quickly. He mentioned that he had looked through my photo albums and that he had just been to Italy too! 

I kid you not, the next day I went to class for our portfolio review day and THERE HE WAS. We both kind of looked at each other like "no way!" Since neither of us knew that each other would be there.

Turns out, my design professor had invited design alumni to come to our class that day to review portfolios and discuss what it was like to be a designer; Andy just happened to be one of the portfolio reviewers that was invited! 

Later that night, he sent me a message, asking if I knew he was going to be there the next day (ha!). I told him I had no idea and that it was kinda crazy that it had worked out that way. We continued chatting through messages for a couple weeks and then he suggested meeting up again to hang out and compare Italy photos.

I agreed, and from then on, we continued to hang out throughout the summer. I eventually got an internship at the same place that he worked (not through him though--through a different designer), and that October, we started dating...

Check back soon for part 2!