Last week, I took a trip around Western Europe to celebrate the end of the 2024-2025 school year. One of my stops along the way was Zürich, Switzerland, a city I’ve wanted to visit but never really fit into my travel plans. However, this time, I had the impetus to make it work: friends from ITE were calling! I’ve been involved in ITE since my first year at USC (so three years in total now) and served as president during 2024-2025. Like me, my friends Tim and Clarkson both also led ITE chapters, at USC (a year before me) and UC Berkeley respectively. Since they graduated in 2024, they’ve both begun master’s degrees in Spatial Development and Infrastructure Systems at ETH Zürich. This is a unique interdisciplinary program combining planning and engineering skillsets to design critical public works projects, making it a perfect fit for transportation enthusiasts in ITE – not to mention offered by one of the world’s leading universities and situated in an excellent city.
I met up both of them over dinner at mit&ohne, a fantastic kebab joint often with a line out the door. Indeed, this was our first time all together since our last inter-chapter conference, the Student Leadership Summit at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, in Feburary 2024. Besides the usual talk about the latest transportation projects and our collective travels, we reminisced about our past ITE adventures: drifting a minivan around San Luis Obispo, winning Target gift cards at ITE casino night, sleeping on crib mattresses in Portland, and much more. I learned about how Tim and Clarkson both found Switzerland to be much more livable than Los Angeles and San Francisco, in large part due to its greater density and stronger active transportation infrastructure. In my eyes, making cities livable is somewhere policy still falls woefully short in the US despite billions of capital investment towards transit and active transportation. And of course, since we’re all transportation enthusiasts, a post-dinner visit to Zürich Hauptbahnhof (Zurich Main Station) to spot trains was obligatory. The three of us were all thoroughly impressed by the breadth of Zürich’s transport network. Despite being a city of only 600,000, the city is served by no less than 18 different tram and 32 S-Bahn commuter rail lines, in addition to numerous intercity and high-speed rail services. As if conjured by our collective love for trains, we spotted the Churchill Pfeil (Churchill Arrow) – a unique red train built in 1939 and aptly named for a very famous British passenger who used it to visit Switzerland following World War II. These days, the train runs as a luxury dining service costing no less than 18,736 Swiss francs (equal to $22,820) for a five hour journey. It’s exclusively a charter service operating only a few days per year, so we were very lucky to spot it!
I left Zürich feeling grateful—not just for the memories, but for the kind of friendships that last beyond the organizations that started them. This experience in Switzerland reinforces my conviction that relationships are among the most important outputs of being involved in orgs like ITE at school. Whether it’s a trip on the other side of the world for fun, or agency approval for an expensive infrastructure project, this involvement constructs the foundations for relationships that make big things possible. Despite not personally working in transportation, ITE has paid me enormous dividends on this front. I can’t wait until the next time I can put this into practice – perhaps on another soirée in Switzerland.
And if you’re not already: get involved in USC ITE!
