Welcome to another GO! Interview! This is our second interview this week and today we are proud to feature Kristina Wegscheider of Do It While You're Young. Kristina co-founded this website with her longtime friend Jerri Stephenson to inspire an adventurous spirit in young women to travel, study, work, or volunteer abroad. Kristina is an experienced traveler herself and we are delighted to share her travel experiences with the GO! community. Enjoy!

GO!: Hi Kristina, thanks for joining us today. Shall we start with a brief introduction?

Kristina: My name is Kristina Wegscheider and I am a California girl! I was born in raised in San Jose, California, received my Bachelor’s degree from U.C. Berkeley and just finished my Master’s degree at Chapman University. Travel is my passion and I try to take 3-4 trips per year. At current count, I am just shy of fifty countries and territories. My most cherished possession is my passport and I am proud to say that it has stamps from all seven continents (yes, even Antarctica!).

I am also the co-founder of Do It While You’re Young (DIWYY), a travel website for young women interested in traveling, studying, working or volunteering abroad.

GO!: How did your blog, Do It While You're Young, come about and what are your goals for the project?

Kristina: My co-founder, Jerri Stephenson, and I met when we were both studying abroad in Australia. We kept in touch after our program ended and visited each almost every year. Around 2005, we came up with the idea for DIWYY as a result of other people hearing about our adventures and saying “I wish I would have done it when I was your age.” From there, we built our mission statement of inspiring young women to go abroad early in life. The goal of our website is to give young women ideas on how they can go abroad based on first-person experiences. Since Jerri and I have not done it all when it comes to travel, we leverage guest writers to help bring in other perspectives.

Our target market was initially college students and young professionals, but has grown to also include high school students. Time is definitely on your side when you are in high school and college so part of our plan is to plant the seed early in the minds of students about the benefits overseas travel. We also have quite a bit of support from our male readers.

There is a lot of travel content out there so the challenge is always what can we write about that will engage readers. We try to showcase both mainstream and off-the-beaten-path locales and also various ways to travel (solo, volunteering, language school, etc) in an effort to give our readers ideas. Social media is a great tool to get your information out, but sites like Twitter and Facebook move so fast that your posts will often fall off the first page after just a few minutes. As a result, we have developed a strategy for continuous promotion of our content that hopefully encourages users to comment on and share with friends.

GO!: Why did you decide to solely focus your content toward young female travelers?

Kristina: From our world travels Jerri and I often noticed that there were a lot more men traveling than women and it made us wonder why. In most of our conversations with women who wanted to travel but had not, we found that fear was at the top of the list. While many young women had the desire, they either did not know where to start planning or felt that it would be unsafe to go alone. DIWYY’s goal is to help young women take that first step and plan their adventure abroad.

That hurdle is one I know too well. I used to have this same stigma before I joined a study abroad program. The experience was scary, yet exciting, and it made me realize that I could venture to another country and be fine. I am now so comfortable traveling alone that it isn’t uncommon for me to head to places like Africa and South America by myself.

I feel it is important for women to travel because it allows them to step out of their routine and experience new cultures, places, and people. It also allows women to gain new perspectives from which they can appreciate life more. My own perspectives on life have shifted drastically since my first trip abroad as an adult in 2002. I don’t sweat the small stuff and I am able to connect with people in social and business settings based on my extensive travel experiences.

GO!: Okay, obvious question, but why should we do it while we're young?

Kristina: I think it should be mandatory for both men and women to travel before they get married and have children. When else in life do you have minimal commitments and the resources to take time out of your regular routine to experience something amazing? I always hear people who say they will travel when their children are grown up, but my philosophy is to start young and continue traveling through all my life stages.

GO!: What, if any, have been the challenges of working independently and remaining focused?

Kristina: In my day job I have specific goals and initiatives that are passed down to me from management. With DIWYY, I am management! It can sometimes feel overwhelming as you try to balance work, a social life, and running a travel website. My strategy for remaining focused is to set clear goals, set aside dedicated time to work on them, and to create a support network to help me achieve them. I am lucky to have two staffers, Christine and Erich, who are a great help. They assist me with content, partnerships, and social media. I have also discovered tricks like setting scheduled Twitter messages through desktop applications like TweetDeck to help me manage my time.

GO!: What has been the most fulfilling aspect of launching DIWYY?

Kristina and Jerri, founders of Do It While You're Young

Kristina: The most fulfilling part of DIWYY is when I get a message from a reader who has been inspired to travel because of our website. I always save these messages to remind myself that all the time and effort I put into the site is worthwhile.

The evolution of DIWYY also amazes me. We officially launched our website in September 2009 and our growth has been tremendous. I remember when our webmaster would give us our site statistics and, in comparison to now, they were nothing, but we were thrilled. Hitting those milestones and enjoying the small achievements on this journey has been incredible to watch. It makes me very excited for what is to come in the future.

GO!: Do you still continue to travel?

Kristina: Of course! I have consistently been doing 3-4 international trips per year for the last few years. So far in 2010 I have visited Tunisia, France and Jordan, and have Croatia, Montenegro, Italy and Spain on the horizon for this summer. I am starting to plan my fall and winter trips and am currently going through the process of selecting possible places. I affectionately refer to them as “candidate cities” and probably follow a similar process as the Olympic selection committee!

GO!: Any tips to share with aspiring travel writers?

Kristina: I encourage all travel writers to build a website so they have a centralized area to list their travel experiences and to post their published pieces. At some point you will be asked for your portfolio and, if you have organized it from the start, it makes your life much simpler. I use a simple WordPress template to list my published pieces and where I have appeared as an expert source on travel. I also love Google Documents to keep copies of all my pieces in one place that is accessible from any computer.

GO!: If you could travel with anyone, alive, dead, or fictional, who would it be and why?

Kristina: I would travel with my father who passed away in 2002. He was an avid traveler and I never really knew much about his adventures because I never asked. After his death, my mom gave me his passports and I discovered he had been to all these amazing places. I started traveling in 2002, a few months after his death, and part of me feels as if he passed the torch to me to begin exploring.

GO!: What are your plans for the future?

Kristina: My plan for the future is to continue to grow DIWYY and expand into other projects relating to it. We are currently working with a literary agent to write the DIWYY book which would be a how-to guide for a first-time traveler. We would also love to host a DIWYY television show to highlight cool destinations for young female travelers.

Outside of DIWYY, I plan to keep traveling the world! At this point I am just shy of 50 countries, but my goal is to hit 100.

GO!: Any last words?

Kristina: Always buy the video when you do something awesome. I was trying to be economical during my eight week adventure in Southern Africa and skipped the video of my bungee jump at Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. I have plans to go back, do the jump again and buy the video.

And my other word of advice: frequent flyer miles are awesome. Just pay attention to expiration dates and participate in promotions to make them work for you! I have cashed in four international business class tickets to date. And trust me, business class makes a 12-hour flight fly by!