Being abroad has allowed me many great opportunities to develop new skills while improving my existing skills. Since arriving in September, I have been faced with many new challenges and situations that I had never experienced in the US. In particular, being in a new environment and creating a new lifestyle when arriving abroad has allowed me to develop myself a lot professionally and personally. I have found myself many times outside of my regular comfort zone and I think navigating those experiences has been the greatest contributor to the development of my soft skills like communication, adaptability and creativity. I have found that my adaptability skills are ones that I have really have relied on heavily here and developed along the way. There are many new situations that present themselves here that I have learned to adapt to, for example, the living situations, the language barrier, the work-life schedule, etc. I have found that this has brought out my creativity skills as a result to find creative solutions to my problems that work best for me. As well as my communication skills that have helped me to communicate my problems and concerns with people who can help me.

I have also found that my classes abroad have been the biggest contributor to the development of my hard skills. International finance and International marketing have increased my knowledge in these realms of my major significantly so far. I am learning so much about these different markets abroad and I look forward to bringing this information with me back to Pitt to apply in my future major classes. I have also really developed my language skills taking Italian. I had only ever taken Chinese language classes in high school before coming here, so Italian has been really interesting for me to learn as it includes more words that are similar to English as well as conjugations. I have really enjoyed that class.

I think the skills that I have acquired here apply mostly to the Business and Societal Impact side of Pitt Business’s “Paths of Distinction” as a lot of what I am learning has to do with different societies around the world as well as the people skills that come along with being abroad. The interactions and relationships I have made here each impact my personal identity and help me to better understand the societal implications of the things I am learning in school and beyond the classroom. Being able to apply my soft skills like adaptability and communication have helped me to better navigate those new cross-cultural interactions and therefore help me to further grow my hard skills from learning from those experiences.

Overall, being abroad has been a transformative experience for me and I look forward to all the future experiences to come in my last two months,