I would say some soft skills I have developed during my time in Florence Italy include but are not limited to non-verbal communication skills, interpersonal skills, and engagement. My nonverbal communication skills have been developed, obviously, by residing in a country where the language I speak is not the primary language. I meet people who do not speak English and find myself learning how to express myself with hand gestures and trying to find words that are somewhat similar to words they might recognize in Italian. I think this is a valuable skill, even though I will be going back to a country where the primary language is English. Second, my interpersonal or “people” skills have advanced because I am meeting new people constantly, and almost everyone in this program is someone I have had to meet, rather than a group of people I have known since freshman year. This is a very important skill to cultivate as a perspective businesswoman. Finally, the length of the classes has increased my engagement and made my attention span much longer than it was before.

One of the main hard skills I have learned is a competency in basic Italian. I can speak somewhat well, but the real change for me has been my ability to understand it. Now, I can walk past a café and recognize what people are talking about, hearing certain words I can identify and filling in the rest. I do well in class and speak/write at maybe a kindergarten Italian level, but I can understand it quite well. I think my ability to coordinate groups of people has increased for sure, as I am planning trips for all of my roommates, or at least a bigger group of people than I am used to. Making sure everyone pays and is down for all the activities requires a politician, it seems.

I think I am navigating cross-cultural situations well, though there are moments when I think that I am not. I will be on a train and the conductor will come along and explain a delay to the woman sitting across from me in Italian, and I will want to demand he repeats it to me in English, but I stop myself. It is easy to expect everything to conform around you, especially as an American, but I have learned that sometimes, you just don’t get to know what is going on with the train, and that’s ok. It is just the way it goes. Some days, I try and order in Italian and really am excited to be somewhere so foreign. But some days, I wish I was in Tampa, Florida, wandering around my mall with a huge “take away” coffee. But, again, I guess that is just the way it goes sometimes.