Today was a jam-packed day, which started off with touring the Sennott Square building with Rebecca Rhoades where our program is taking place, and then, when we start in the fall, some of our classes will be there as well as the career center, which is a major help in securing internships and careers in the future. After the tour, we talked about co-curricular programs, which allow Pitt Business students to learn topics that are not necessarily taught in classes but are beneficial when we get to the workplace and can also lead to interesting internships.

Then we had and EIR lunch with Kathy Foody Malus who has had a long and successful career in investments. She stressed the importance of joining student organizations. The one that stood out to me the most was the smart woman securities organization because it gives you a 10 week investments crash course and then you can become a junior analysis which would work with using an investment portfolio that manages about $500,000 and constantly growing.

After our morning we jumped into the StrengthsFinder with Mike Kijowski. In the strengthsfinder I learned that my top 5 strengths were 1. context, 2. competition, 3. relator, 4. learner, 5. focus. I learned that context as my number one means I use the past to help guide current projects which is very help because you can learn a lot from past experiences like what went well, but also what did not go well and then improve on the downsides to improve. Also I learned being a relator means that I can use relationships I already have to pull people together. In the group exercise the girls were a groups and we all had different traits but we were able to all find some role in the group most of the roles naturally happened. In this case I was one of the first people to start the conversation and take a lead of figuring out roles by what each person strengths were. This meant that I was using my relator trait tie multiple people together to work on one goal. I can use many of my strengths to help develop the project for this course, but I can especially use my context and relator traits. I will heavily being relying on my context traits to find solutions to making more revenue for Carrigart not only in the off season but in the summer as well. I will be using context to do this because I can research other locations in Ireland and across the globe to find similar circumstances and what they did best and what went wrong and then based off of those answers I can come up with a best course of action to address the revenue problem. Furthermore, I can use relator strengths to bring business together in the community because partnerships tend to draw in more revenue because it allows you to offer more services and experiences and with that you can charge more money to create a higher revenue stream. All in all your best strengths can help you in a multitude of different situations.

After we learned about our strengths, we had a crash course history lesson with Dr. Phil Hnatkovich, where we learned the history of Ireland in the earliest stages of the country, stopping during World War I, which will serve as a foundation to be built upon throughout our program. I am very interested in history, so this lesson was quite interesting for me. All in all, I am quite excited to learn more about the history and culture of Ireland, especially the town of Carrigart, which will be the focus of our project.