The two months abroad have taught me many lessons, some by fire and some through teaching. I have grown so much as a person. My maturity, cultural awareness, and self-awareness have all grown a great deal while in Spain. I am so excited and thankful to have been given the opportunity to go abroad and be an international ambassador for Pitt.  

The first area of growth I will touch on falls under all three categories: Personal, academically, and professionally. Improving my Spanish was a personal goal of mine going into the summer. In the same token, it is a field of study for me so I identify it as academic goal. Furthermore, I would like to use it later on in my career. When I arrived in Spain I was OK at Spanish. It was very frustrating the first two to three weeks, I would struggle every day to understand the gritty details of the conversation and just cling to the main idea. I would go home and be extremely bummed out for an hour or two before I saw my friends and then we would talk about or struggles and everyone was in the same boat as me which made me feel significantly better. However, I did not want to be like everyone else, I made it my mission to improve in every way possible. I signed up for a conversation exchange app and would message people and eventually met up with native Spanish speakers to improve my language. Eventually, through trial and error, hand gestures, repetition, and hard work I have improved my Spanish to the point of easily communicating with a native speaker on deeper subjects. I received many compliments on my accent and understanding of the conversations. My biggest goal was accomplished!

A personal growth I noticed while living and working in Spain was taking more risks. Taking more risks was an easy goal to accomplish due to the fact that I was already outside of comfort zone. I would make a deal with myself to go out of my way to strike up a conversation with a stranger, try new foods, and immerse myself in different experiences. For instance, I would never turn down any kind of food I did not recognize. I assume if someone is going to make the food they hopefully think it’s tasty. Another example is when I was confused or didn’t know what was going on I would usually just act like a regular and pretend like I knew exactly what was going on. After one week I realized I would rather be educated than pretend to know what I was doing.  

I grew in many professional “areas”. I become more adaptable, have a better awareness of what working in an office is like, and networking. I met many people that I will keep in contact for years to come. The ladies I worked with will certainly act as my references for the future and when I visit Madrid I will return and speak with my former coworkers. I only really worked in one “office” job before this summer and it was only once a week. This year I saw the ins and outs of the “behind the scenes and the interactions between the workers, bosses and underlings. Becoming more adaptable was a great one to work on while in Spain because of the ambiguity of the job. There were many instances where I was confused as to what to do and had to adapt to what my boss wanted.

There truly were countless takeaways from Spain that I will use in my everyday life and won’t even realize it. One thing I will always look back on is the pace of life for the Spaniards. They work to live while us Americans live to work. I will remember that attitude when school gets stressful and I’ll be able to settle down and not get too worked up. The biggest takeaway is clearly my Spanish. I am confident in my abilities to speak with anyone about almost all subjects. I am not fluent but I certainly made great progress to that level. 

I can’t wait to get back to Pitt and share all my experiences and lessons I have learned with everyone…. Who are willing to listen!!