Hi! My name is Lola, I’m a senior mechanical engineer at Pitt and I just finished my first study abroad with Swanson in Brazil! I did this program because it was the first chance I got to study abroad and I’m really happy with how it turned out.
So my understanding going into this program was that it was kind of like model UN except people were actually from different countries. And I’ve never actually done model UN, but I think that was still an accurate description. It was a bit more business focused than I anticipated, with us touring a handful of businesses in the region and coming up with a pitch of our own.
Being an engineer, this is not something I’m used to at all. I like to think I have the communication and collaboration skills that engineers are often profiled as not having, however my experience is rather lacking in the business side of things. And I’d honestly say that that’s what I learned most in this program; how to execute some of the more business aspects of the engineering process.
Being completely honest, this kind of felt just any other really involved group project, just in an unfamiliar environment. I feel like a lot of the time with study abroad courses the goal is to “understand things from a new perspective” or something else, but everyone I spoke to was exactly like me. It felt just like making new friends in a new place, and not much else. The moments of conflict and moments of cohesion felt kind of exactly like they would in any other group project. Any conflict experienced followed the widely familiar path of stem vs liberal arts, there wasn’t really anything that stemmed from cultural differences or communication issues. Sure we all had different experiences in a lot of things, but overall, we were all immensely similar people.
