Now that I have been home from London for about two weeks, I will reflect on my experience there. Overall, it was a good learning experience that helped me grow on a personal level, not just academically or professionally. I was able to live and work in a foreign country on my own for 6 weeks and not many people can say that, so I am proud of myself. I know now that I can make it through moving to a new place in the United States after college if that’s what I choose to do since I was able to do it in a whole other country. My biggest takeaway from the experience is this personal growth and ability to adapt that I developed more.

As far as other things I learned, I would say communicating and working with people from other cultures are important things that I developed, and these contributed to enhancing my cultural intelligence which will be beneficial to my future career, and I can bring this back to Pitt Business for my last remaining semester before graduation. Academically in my developmental psychology class, I learned about attachment styles and about myself through this learning and class which I was surprised about as I didn’t expect to learn things about myself in a class like that. It helped me better understand myself and my relationships.

This may not be a common point of view, but while I developed professionally and personally as I have mentioned, I do not believe I developed academically. I found that classes on campus at Pitt are much more challenging and rigorous than my experience at CEACAPA in London. This may be because it was a summer class and those can work heavy, but less intense in other regards because professors are aware that students have a lot going on. Also, I have already been through 4 years of college at Pitt with only one semester left, so I have been through many different classes already. Additionally, I felt similarly about the internship class as Pitt Business had already taught me most of what was covered in that class.

I already mentioned my biggest takeaway was the personal growth I experienced enabling me to know that I can move somewhere new on my own, but my other key takeaway is how important cultural intelligence is and how it will become more and more important as the world becomes more globalized – working with people of other cultures is unavoidable and when done well, it can create better outcomes than working with people from one place and/or of one mindset.