I honestly did not have a ton of expectations coming into my study abroad program. I really wasn’t sure how anything would be, and just wanted to take everything as it came and enjoy it to the fullest extent. That being said, I did have general expectations, for example, I expected that the courses I took would build off of what I’ve learned in previous business courses and offer valuable knowledge I would be able to take back to Pitt. The courses that I am taking while here are International Marketing, International Economics, International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior, and Analysing and Exploring the Global City: Sydney. I was very excited about these, as a Marketing and Global Management major, these courses tie perfectly into my interests and what I’ve already been learning about in previous courses. I do not think that my academic expectation of building on previous knowledge as well as offering new insights has changed at all, and my expectation has definitely been met up to this point. All of my professors have super unique experiences and are able to tie them so well into course content and not only makes the classes more engaging, but more relatable.

Professionally, I would say my expectations have been exceeded. Since I am not completing an internship, I didn’t have a ton of goals I wanted to accomplish on the professional side of things. The second week here, I applied to and was selected to be a student representative for our program. My job is to plan and coordinate events for everyone in my program. I was also given a budget that I was able to use. Between these two things, I gained a lot of valuable experience with things like problem solving when things went wrong the day of an event and budgeting. Also just overall professionalism has been something the student reps have gotten more experience in. For example, we all take turns taking minutes during our meetings and send them out at the conclusion of the meeting.

Personally, my expectations have been way exceeded. I feel like I have become a much more confident person in all my abilities seeing how I was able to move across the world and still make friends, excel in school, and get involved with extracurriculars. The experiences I’ve had here and memories I have are going to most definitely last a lifetime, and so will the friends I’ve made.