The global service-learning course is a semester along project that I’ll never forget. My trip to Bolivia was a once in a lifetime experience although hopefully I’ll be able to return. Today I’m going to do my best to summarize my experience both in the class in the country as well as finalizing the deliverables. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had more time to reflect on my trip and more time to think about changes that can be made in the future. Even though I’ll be graduating in a little over 2 weeks, I’m confident that the lessons I learned will stick with me for the lifetime. Both of my global experiences the pit this program as well as my trip to India have been the crown jewel of my time here at the University of Pittsburgh College of Business Administration. I am very excited for the opportunity today to reflect on this trip and the project.
I feel the key lesson that I learned during this course was the importance of trust. This is not only about trust between the team but also about trust between the team and the client. I believe our team had issues with this earlier in the semester and the improvement of trust since then has been a great force for us to drive the project forward. The low point of our project was our scheduled time with Meade in mid-February. In mid-February as a team, we decided to meet with her outside of class to get more information about how we could approach the marketing aspects of our deliverables. Mistakenly, I had completely blanked that I had family visiting during the exact time we had scheduled our call with Meade until about 8 hours before our call. I informed the group to let them know that I could not make it and figured that it would resolve itself. Later I heard from Leanne that she ended up being the only member of the group to attend. I felt like this was really a failure in trust as a group. I personally felt as though I lost a lot of credibility with the team because frankly it wasn’t acceptable to leave a member of the team out alone. I felt although this was a low point for our group, especially so close to our group’s departure for Cochabamba, we did an amazing job of changing and building trust once we got in country.
Bumps and bruises aside, building trust and working with Ronald at CEOLI was certainly another key lesson for me. By us emphasizing early how tangible we wanted the results to be, and occasionally pushing back on some of his ideas for the project, I believe we were able to establish credibility relatively early. I am optimistic that we were able to show him that we care about CEOLI mission and that is why we were there. I think this trust reflected in his trust in us to come to him with new ideas for project deliverables. He was relatively open about having some fatigue from the challenge of the card project and how it felt hard to track/measure success. This trust helped guide our decisions to look for alternative sources of funding and eventually to start the alumni outreach project.
I would say that two of the more transferable skills that I gained from the project was applying my linguistic competence from my other course work to communicate with the team at CEOLI, as well as learning to run a mini development project and get an idea about best practices for fundraising. In my applied linguistics course this semester I had the opportunity to study translation in professional settings. Our course particularly focused on medical interaction as that is the field of study that my professor has focused on in his research, but a lot of the concepts are applicable to business situations. One key concept that we learned that this course helped to solidify is tracking turn taking and speech time for each participant in the conversation. Turn taking refers to how we interact and ‘take turns’ when we are speaking with someone. Translation makes this very interesting as you can track the time that each party speaks and use that to identify areas where there could be loss of content across the linguistic divide. I never had the chance to apply this in real life until our conversations with Ronald where it was easy to tell if we potentially missed material and ask to follow up questions to make sure that we can get all the information.
Drafting templates, acquiring contacts, and doing outreach was a valuable experience especially as I enter my career in the start up technology world. Getting people to meet with you is half the battle of any non-profit or company. This skill has already been transferable to my work outside of class. Beyond meeting setting, I found that meeting and preparing an agenda for each alumnus has been insightful into both how the program has operated in the past, as well as a great opportunity to practice discovery questions which we learned from Meade at the beginning of the semester. Meeting with people who have been in a similar position has been really entertaining in addition to beneficial. For example, we spoke with one alumnus who was part of the 2020 cohort which is obviously overshadowed by the Covid-19 global shutdown. I never connected that the political unrest we had discussed in our cultural presentation impacted another student’s experience. He told us about the United States Department of State’s travel warning against Bolivia at the beginning of the semester and how they had false hope when it was reduced to a lower travel advisory. Although I am a business major, and we certainly have a culture in the US that gets straight to business, I truly believe that getting to know someone personally is both beneficial to the business relationship and our own health. You can be yourself while being professional.
On the note of relationships, we continued to build on Pitt Business’s existing relationship with the CEOLI. This had a few plusses and minuses for the team. Firstly, we were able to build upon the existing credibility of students form the Pitt Business cohorts that have been sent onsite. This helped us early with establishing an open channel of communication directly to both CEOLI and Amizade. I also felt that this existing relationship certainly helped build my urgency. This was not only my relationship and project, but the relationship and project for the next 10 years. I felt this relationship did also have a negative effect on our ability to select the best deliverables, although I think our group did a great job of interpreting the information we got. Perhaps if we did not have an existing relationship, we could have potentially found other challenges as the conversation would be framed without existing context. I hope we improved the relationship with CEOLI this semester as they will hopefully see tangible results from the work we did. I have a lot of confidence that the alumni project could be a successful multiyear project for them.
This trip will certainly come up in my future job or graduate school interviews, as I have exclusively discussed my other study abroad in every interview I have had since. My plan is to frame it as either an outreach and development project, or highlight some of the project management fundamentals we learned from the course work. Likely as soon as Bolivia comes up, people will want to learn more about my experience on the ground. If that is the case, I will highlight a few different experiences depending on the context of the interview. First, our extra stop in Colombia, I felt that this was a situation that highlighted how I and the rest of the group adapted that was less than ideal. The travel component of this trip was by far the most intense part of the course, I don’t believe I will ever experience that intense an itinerary for the rest of my life. Second, I would highlight the on the ground discovery questions that we discussed with Ronald and how I use that experience to guide my approach today.
I have a few tips for the next group that I hope will help them out, although I am sure they will do great! First, do not get stuck on your first idea and don’t be scared to share an idea that is a total pivot. We went into the project with an idea of what we would do and now in April that is nowhere near what we imagined. Second, I would always remind myself that the most impactful thing we can do for CEOLI is get them more USD. Finally, and I know that Bryan will certainly highlight this on repeat but, stay tangible. The team at CEOLI and Amizade are already busy, it’s your job as a consultant to get the project to the finish line, don’t trust someone else to implement it or it won’t get done.