A senior at the University of Maryland, I am pursuing a double degree in International Business and Marketing with minors in International Development & Conflict Management and Spanish. Academic programs I have participated in include: Entrepreneurship and Innovation Honors Program, Global Consulting Fellows, and Business Honors.

 

My experiences prior to enrolling at the University played a large role in shaping the academic path I chose to pursue. In spite (or perhaps because) of being born in Owings Mills, Maryland and raised there my entire life, I have always had a penchant for all things global.

 

Foreign Language

In elementary school, I fell in love with the study of foreign language and studied French through the AP level in high school. Thereafter, I took courses in Spanish and briefly independently studied Korean. An aspiring polyglot, I try to keep up my French skills even though I am no longer pursuing formal classes, and would love to begin studying Portuguese or further developing my skills in Korean.  

 

I have greatly enjoyed applying my passion for foreign languages domestically and abroad. Ever since beginning my study of French, I have always had pen pals with whom I’ve kept in contact through both snail mail and email/social media. While communicating with native speakers through letters and messages has definitely helped my skills, nothing compares to an in-country immersion experience.

 

International Travel

Australia and New Zealand: The summer after my eighth grade year, I participated in my first semi-independent global travel experience. Through the People to People program, I traveled to Australia and New Zealand for two-and-a-half weeks with a delegation of thirty other students. While I had before vacationed with my family in Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, this experience opened my eyes to global travel and cross-cultural understanding. During my trip, I had the opportunity to visit important landmarks such as the Sydney Opera House, the Beehive in New Zealand, and the Great Barrier Reef. In Australia, we spent the weekend with a host family and spent the night in a traditional dwelling of New Zealand’s Maori people.

 

South Korea: Having attended a high school that was also an international boarding school, I made several friends from different countries. The summer after my ninth grade year, a classmate and friend invited me to spend part of the summer in her home in Seoul, Korea. I enjoyed this trip as a very authentic travel experience; while my three weeks were peppered with some touristy activities (visiting Jeju-do, going to museums, etc.), we spent most of our time doing typical Korean teenager activities, like shopping, singing karaoke, and hanging out in the bustling (now of pop-culture fame) Gangnam District. During this trip, I picked up some Korean (I can still read and write hangul even though my vocabulary and grammar have significantly waned), perfected my use of chopsticks, and gained a true appreciation of other cultures. Whereas many other trips I had taken allowed me to look at other cultures as a spectacle, my experience in Seoul asked me to live in another culture, challenging my own assumptions and ethnocentric worldview.

 

Senegal: In my junior year of high school, I applied for a grant to complete an international service project and received funding to spend one month in Senegal teaching music lessons to children in a daycare. This first independent travel experience (I did not travel with a group, friends or family) allowed me to fully immerse myself in another culture, living with a host family and working each day alongside Senegalese people. At this point, my desire to pursue a globally-related major in college was crystallized. 

 

Nicaragua: The summer after my freshman year of college, I participated in the inaugural Maryland Social Entrepreneur Corps cohort. I traveled to Nicaragua for eight weeks to engage in community development work and consulting projects with local entrepreneurs. This experience was a great example of how the three things I was studying—business, entrepreneurship, and international development—could come together in the real world. I enjoyed this experience so much that I accepted a position as a campus ambassador for the following school year, educating the campus community about social entrepreneurship and working on a remote consulting project assessing the feasibility of an online Spanish school. You can read some of the blog posts I wrote for SEC here.

 

South Africa: The summer after my sophomore year of college, I traveled to Cape Town with the inaugural Smith in South Africa program. We spent a bit over two weeks learning about social enterprise in the South African context. This was a great opportunity to learning about history, economy and culture in a classroom setting, and then apply that knowledge by creating a social entrepreneurship model for a local institution, an artisan pottery co-op in a nearby township.

 

I look forward to continuing to explore the world on my upcoming study abroad trip to Dubai and Hong Kong. I depart on December 26! Additionally, I will be traveling to Germany in the spring of 2016 to conduct a meeting of my public service sorority.

 

Academic and Extracurricular Experiences

Through my programs of study and my extracurricular activities, I have sought to infuse a global perspective into my experience at the University of Maryland. My International Business major has exposed me to concepts of international marketing, finance and supply chain management.  Additionally, I have taken and served as a teaching assistant for a course in International Entrepreneurship. Further, my experience in the Global Consulting Fellows program taught me about the critical study of cultural differences (Geerte & Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, etc.). However, I believe that some of my most globally enriching courses have occurred outside of the business school. As a minor in International Development and Conflict Management, I have taken courses in international development, conflict management, and global poverty that have required me to stretch myself in looking at international issues outside of a business context. One of these courses was a pilot course for UMD’s global classroom initiative; as such, we worked in teams with students from Tel Aviv University to design an international development project in a conflict zone. This course not only allowed me to learn about our research topic of choice (education for Syrians in refugee camps), but also gave me the experience of working with those of another culture.

 

Further, the Spanish courses I’ve taken have contributed to my global mindset. In one course, we worked with students in Ecuador, negotiating the terms of a fictionalized joint venture. These courses have helped me not only to develop my language skills but have also given me perspective in cross-cultural communication as well as Latin American culture, current events and politics.

 

Through these experiences, I’d like to think that I have developed three main skills: foreign language and communications, cultural competence, and adaptability. Not only have gained a proficiency in French and Spanish, but through my years of study I’ve developed an understanding of language that makes it relatively easy for me to learn new ones. Further, I have very strong written and communication skills in my native language, especially in delivering presentations.

 

Next, I’ve developed my cultural competence. In traveling to several countries, working professionally and academically with individuals from other countries, and studying cultures in academic settings, I have gained an understanding of a several cultures, including those of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

 

Finally, I have become a highly adaptable and open-minded person. I am comfortable being thrown into new environments and encountering new people.

 

Through this course I hope to leverage and build upon these competencies.

 

Looking Forward

I plan to apply my academic background and extracurricular experiences to a career in strategy and operations management consulting. I know I will be able to apply a robust global mindset to this work, whether it is through being staffed abroad, working with a multinational client, or interacting with colleagues of other cultures.Through the creation of this portfolio, I have augmented my past global experiences through in-class and extracurricular activities to develop a true, robust global mindset.