As I approach the final days in London I wanted to reflect on my experience. These couple of weeks in London have made me very proud of myself. I didn’t know what to expect when I was thrown into an unknown environment, but I am impressed with the outcome. I went on adventures, created new friends, and went exploring by myself. I built up my confidence, became more social, and challenged myself to say yes to more things. By doing this I put myself into uncomfortable situations because I didn’t know the outcome, but in the end, I had a lot of fun.

I also learned a lot about different cultures. This experience helped me reflect on my own internal biases and judgments. I came into contact with a lot of different people, new foods, and some culture shocks like what side of the road to walk on. This experience helped me to practice how to adapt to new places and how to be respectful to the residents around me. I wanted to respect their home and make a good impression on study abroad students.

Throughout this whole experience, I’ve become less anti-social, I learned how to adapt, I learned how to balance my life in a new place and I became more confident in myself. These four things have helped me grow professionally, academically, and personally.

Furthermore, the key takeaways from this program are that sometimes you need to throw yourself into a new environment to truly improve upon yourself. In school, I struggled to participate and be social. But this experience forced me to participate in class, participate in site visits, be social to make friends, and just be able to go walk around London by myself (I had to be confident and social in my new environment in case I needed to ask questions). I intend to continue to build on this improvement and bring it back to Pitt Business. I hope that it will continue to help me build a broader network because I won’t be afraid to speak up and I won’t be afraid to say yes to new experiences. Overall, this experience showed how I can be successful and independent. I hope to continue to implement these characteristics back home, so I can continue to work on my growth.

To end this series of blog posts I wanted to talk about what my favorite things were here in London. My favorite adventure was walking around and looking at all the street art. My favorite street art places were Brixton and the East End. I also enjoyed all of the markets. I would recommend the Brick Lane Vintage Market, which had a lot of different food stands on the first floor, then there was another floor for vintage clothing stands. I would recommend having an afternoon tea, I went to The Ivy Chelsea Garden for a full afternoon tea.

Lastly, I have some food recommendations. First of all, London has an amazing selection of restaurants, so it was very hard to pick my favorite. My top two were Granger & Co. and Fare. Granger & Co had the best chicken sandwich with a gochujang glaze and a fruit, white chocolate, and pistachio pavlova.

 Fare was an Italian restaurant that had very fancy pizzas and the best tiramisu I’ve ever had.

I definitely think I’m going to miss the food and being able to walk everywhere the most. However, as of now, I’m looking forward to seeing my family, but I will miss London. I hope to come back in the future. So instead of goodbye, I’ll see you later London!