I am developing a lot of transferable or soft skills during my time in South Africa. I believe the soft skill I am developing the most is my communication, particularly my communication with people from different backgrounds.

Being a student in the College of Business Administration has allowed me to interact with a variety of people through group work in classes, career fairs, and forging my own path within CBA. However, one thing that CBA or Pitt as a whole lacks is diversity. The school is predominantly White and consists mostly of students from the northeastern region of the country. Although everyone has their own background and experiences, many of our backgrounds tend to overlap. In South Africa, this program has allowed me to reach a more diverse group of people who are influencing not only my education but also my growth as a human being.

Interacting with local South Africans, most notably our guide Johnathan, who we spent every day with, has allowed me to understand more about his background, who he is, and how his culture influences him. This has been awesome and has enhanced my ability to communicate with him and others. South Africa is a very diverse country, some may argue even more so than the United States. There are indigenous African people, White Afrikaners, and people of Asian descent, all coming together to form what is known as South Africa. Being exposed to all these backgrounds has been very informative for my experience.

A technical or hard skill that I have gained throughout my program has been research and different forms of research. In one of my classes, we are building a digital story map, which will be used in both Pittsburgh and South Africa. The formation of the story map included extensive research that we conducted during our month in the country, visiting different museums, and historical locations, and using media and data analytics. Research is something I am particularly interested in, and using data analytics to do this has been an amazing experience for me.

As someone very interested in pursuing a career in data analytics or product management, both of these skills will be incredibly helpful. As a product manager, I would need to learn how to communicate with a variety of people on different teams in order to reach my goal of creating a specific product. Having this experience in another country has been invaluable.

Additionally, as a potential future data analyst, I would need to know how to work with data sets in any industry on any topic. Using data analytics on a topic such as history within another country has been very beneficial for my growth.

Both personally and academically, this experience and the skills I have gained have been great and will help me as I complete my last year at the University of Pittsburgh. They will also allow me to demonstrate these skills to employers and utilize them in my final classes.