Living and navigating through Florence has certainly been developmental in both my soft and hard skills. Adaptability is definitely the first one that comes to mind; you are adapting to all new people from different schools, a totally different city and school campus, and professors who are from Italy. Adaptability has especially been keen in traveling on the weekends. You need to be able to navigate different forms of public transportation in order to have successful trips: airplanes, buses, trains, taxis, subways, ferries, everything! Having a language barrier in the signage for all of these transportation methods is another hardship, but the use of Google Translate is helpful. Adapting to cities that aren’t your everyday Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is vital for getting around. This also relates to soft skills in teamwork and problem-solving; if something on a trip goes wrong and you’re in a different country, you need to figure it out together. Finding alternative routes, asking for help from strangers, and using translation to navigate your way through a foreign train station are all so important to work on to make a trip go well. Communication with your roommates is important because in my situation with my roommates, none of us knew each other prior or were friends, so figuring out how to live together, share spaces and bedrooms, and coexist with strangers is important in your everyday life.
These transferable skills in communication, adaptation, and problem-solving will definitely be helpful back at Pitt when working with groups on projects, communicating with new people you haven’t met before, and engaging in cross-cultural collaboration in professional opportunities when there is a lot of pressure to meet a certain goal and standard with people who come from different walks of life than you.
On the other side, I have gained numerous hard skills through my coursework, especially my Art Renaissance history class. I have developed an understanding of both Renaissance art and architecture and the vast amount of history behind Florence (and even still underneath Florence’s grounds to this day!). I can identify different street names and names of shops and match them to different famous patrons and artists of the Renaissance (like Massacio Street is near our house, and Masaccio was one of the most famous painters of the early Renaissance).
My visual analysis has been immensely strengthened through this class, as I can also understand the historical significance of Florence much more, including the Florence Cathedral, Palazzo Vecchio, Santa Croce, Church of Santa Maria Novella, and so much more. I am able to connect what I learn in the classroom and in museums and churches to the real world all around me; it’s expanded my knowledge of Italian culture and history so broadly!