During my time in Florence between my classes and my internship, I’ve been able to expand my soft and hard skills. One skill that I would like to highlight is the enrichment of my time management skills. Since I’ve been in Florence, I’ve needed to budget my time a lot more. Between balancing my courseload and studying, I also need to balance my workload from my internship as well as the things I want to do during my time in Florence. Another skill I’ve been able to expand on is my cross-cultural teamwork. My internship is with The Canadian School of Florence. I work with my HR Manager who is Italian, The Head of School who is Canadian, and the principals of the schools who are British and Italian. When we are all working on a project together, I get to hear their approaches to problems relating to human resources, and I get to take on tasks that they think the American approach is best. One way I can provide an American approach is in onboarding and orientation for new employees. I am creating a new proactive onboarding and orientation program instead of their passive onboarding approach. In the newly developed approach, The employees will be supported from the date of hire through the first year of their position. This relates to the hard skill of creating HR content for onboarding and orientation programs. With the program’s implementation, we hope to gain more employee feedback and lower employee turnover.
My time in Florence can cover various aspects of Pitt Business’s paths of distinction. Though it doesn’t encapsulate any path in full, I am innovating spaces in my internship and in my ways of studying in different digital workspaces and processes.
Every day is a different situation for me navigating a cross-cultural situation. I’m always battling the self-checkout registers in Esselunga and needing to call the staff to help me because I need a loyalty card and I don’t have one. I can speak Italian well but I find it hard to think of what to say in situations like that. Living with my roommates also from all over the US, we all come from different backgrounds and I am the cleanest of them. I have to deal with living around their living styles. It does slow down alot of processes for me. The best thing I can do in these situations is adapt to the situations. In the store, I will just use the register with a worker to avoid needing a loyalty card, and at home, I will just live around the roommates. I may need to wash dishes before I use them because they are dirty or need to fold someone else’s clothes on the drying rack to use it for myself.
