Hello everyone, my name is Taavi Herzog. I just finished my first year in the College of Business Administration at Pitt. Although I’m still considering the advice of lots of people in my circle, I’ll say for the sake of decision in the immediate that I’m going to earn a double major between Business Analytics and Finance and both an Economics and a Computer Science minor. Recognizing the forward-looking trends of living in a world built upon data and, more fundamentally, code, I think this degree will provide me a necessary foundation for a great number of challenges I hope to overcome.
As it happens, I’ve actually completed my summer program at this point. The blog prompts for this scholarship have only just recently been released. I took part in the Plus3 program that’s offered to Business and Engineering (and in one case, Nursing) students from about May 6th – May 19th. There are a lot of groups in the overall program who each go to a different country to learn about a unique culture while maintaining some sort of an academic tilt. In my case, I went to Costa Rica. Our academic focus was on the sustainability and supply chain of the coffee industry, although we also dabbled a little in some other tropical fruits like pineapples and bananas.
Truthfully, although I do care deeply for sustainability, I won’t throw that out as some grand reason for why I decided to embark on a two-week journey to Central America. I’d known about Plus3 since before my Freshman year. My older brother, an engineer, did the Ecuador trip. I saw the program as a chance to grow. I’ve been told countless times that, despite success being a recipe heavily laden with good fortune, it also relies on an individual’s ability to recognize opportunities as they present themselves, and to take them. In my eyes, a trip like Plus3 was an opportunity. In a different environment, with new people and new ideas all around me, I would inevitably find myself a fair distance outside my comfort zone. Before the program, of course I couldn’t have named all the experiences I would have and how I would grow from each of them. But, I could expect there would be a good number. Whether it was in trying a new food or making sure our group arrived home safely at night in a foreign city with a flawed map, I would find chance after chance to improve myself.
That’s it. That’s the only reason I wanted to do this trip. I know the expected answer is “Oh, well I love coffee and Costa Rica is a beautiful country and I know the people there are really good at taking care of the environment and that’s so important to me and supply chain is something that I’m curious to learn about and—” That’s enough. None of that is true for anyone who says it, unless they’ve magically figured themselves out at the ripe age of 18. Whoever knows himself truly, I envy.
