Throughout this program, I have gained a lot of transferable and technical skills. One of the top skills I learned was adaptability. Being in a completely new environment and culture in general has made me more adaptable. One of the main areas I see this popping up in is figuring out the Tube system. My first week here, I was terrified of the Tube. I constantly thought I was going to get lost and I was staring at my phone to figure out the right platform to be on and triple checking which train I was supposed to take. Now, I have become significantly more confident in my abilities. I can look at the map and in general figure out where to go and what train to take. This newfound confidence has also made me more comfortable with making mistakes on the Tube. I have also found that my time management skills have improved immensely. With traveling on the weekends and still trying to sightsee in London while juggling school work, there are a lot of things that I am not willing to give up. To do all of these things, I needed to make sure that I was maximizing my time. I am now much better at planning out my schedule for the week and allotting time for everything that is important to me while still keeping my grades up and getting assignments done on time. 

Technical skills that I have gained include improved writing skills. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, the first 2 and a half years of college I have not taken a single writing class. While I never thought that my writing skills were horrible, I knew that there was definitely room for improvement. Many of my classes here require me to write research papers and participate in creative writing. This was a part of my brain that I had not trained in a while and when I had to write my first essays, I was lost on where to even start. But over time, I have found it becoming easier and easier and I even enjoy writing now. It is much easier for me to plan out my essay and I am better able to communicate my thoughts and ideas. Also, for my creative writing class, I have had the opportunity to be more imaginative. In any of the classes I’ve taken, making up stories was never something that my professors were looking for, but now it is one of the main things I do in that class. I have found that through this, I have become more imaginative and creative in general, even outside of class and writing. 

I have had very pleasant experiences interacting with the locals and other program participants in London. I think that is contributed to the fact that many of the people in London are immigrants or are also here to study and work for a short period of time. Everyone here has a very different story of how they came to London or what their life was like growing up in London and I have found a lot of enjoyment from just listening to their stories. Gaining this more global perspective has helped me appreciate learning from people outside of my network and my immediate surroundings a lot more. There is something to learn from everyone and these random conversations have sparked a lot of those learnings in me. While we may all be from wildly different cultures, there are also values that stay throughout different communities. I have felt incredibly privileged to be studying abroad in London so far, and I can’t wait to see what else I learn about myself, others, and cultures throughout the rest of my program.