Sophia Bertsch is a rising senior at St. Joe’s University majoring in History with minors in Spanish and Sociology, with a budding interest in public transit. She is originally from a suburb in Long Island, New York, but after a study abroad semester in Madrid, she gained an appreciation for taking public transportation.

 She explains that the trip allowed her to move past the stigma around public transportation: “I just heard a lot of complaints about it. I’d take the train, or the regional rail is mainly what St. Joe’s students utilize. But especially for the bus, I was just kind of like, I knew it took longer… complaints of, oh, it’s not consistent. Things like that that I realized were part of a larger systemic funding issue…but there’s a certain way I think we perceive transportation as, and a lot of things, especially in the US. And I kind of got clear on it because I studied abroad, but it just made me realize that we just kind of want transportation to just be like a blip. We just want to be somewhere as fast as possible. And while that’s, I mean, it’s obviously true that transportation should be efficient, but there’s also… Kind of like a stop and smell the roses element that I realized when I studied abroad in Madrid”

After this realization, Sophia came back to the US ready to utilize public transit to its fullest. It of course came with a learning curve, but after taking on Madrid, she seemed to have her mind made up: “I think that definitely studying abroad opened my mind up to, okay, transportation is good. It’s, like, just… Realizing to get me out of my own shell, out of my own head and into the city, I realized SEPTA could do that. So it’s a combination of studying abroad, seeing what public transportation could be…And then actually taking SEPTA broke down the barriers of like, it’s a good public transportation system. Like obviously there’s a funding systemic issue that I talked about, but overall for me, it got me where I want to go. And exposed me to things that I wouldn’t have been exposed to without it.”

She did, of course, have those learning moments, but she explains that she was always ready to take them in: “ literally like last week on the SEPTA; that is just yelling like  “door!” and people being like, “you have to step down”. “The doors will open for you”…I just realized like similar to a lot of other environments, like I just have to be a sponge”

Her journey with public transit isn’t focused solely on her own convenience, Sophia also talked about being a supporter of the current U-pass Campaign happening at St. Joe’s, explaining that she believed Philadelphia was a great resource for students and saw the program as a way to get students out of their “St Joe’s bubble”  stating that “hopefully I’ll start seeing St. Joe’s hoodies in the city… yeah, I’m hoping it’ll like really facilitate a presence in the city…I’m hopeful and excited that it’s something that’ll kind of like plant the seed in students’ minds kind of how the forum did for me”