Outcomes

Now that I am back in the states at home reflecting on the trip I have realized I learned a lot over the past five weeks. This was a great experience for me in terms of both engineering and my education and I really appreciated being part of this program. It is definitely something I'll remember for my whole life. 

I learned several things as a result of this very unique study abroad experience. I learned how to communicate a lot better. Living and working in a city that you are not fluent in the language helps you learn to communicate better since you can’t get your exact point across. It helped me to be able to be less of a perfectionist in that way too. I know some Spanish, but obviously when learning a language mistakes will happen. I do not know how to say everything perfect and this study abroad experience helped me learn that it is okay. I had a lot of conversations where me and the other person probably missed a lot of what we each were trying to say. However, usually we still got the main point of what we were trying to say to each other. Learning how to say things very concise and simple is a very important thing to learn for all parts of life really. But of course I did learn more Spanish, so I will be able to speak more Spanish as a result of this experience. I plan to continue learning Spanish and this experience boosted my Spanish speaking confidence so feel more comfortable practicing the language. This experience helped me realize how much Spanish I actually know. 

Going to Paris with very little knowledge of french made me really realize how much spanish I knew!



I also learned that being on the other side of the world does not really feel any different. Also the differences in technology has helped me learn to be less dependent on it. I care way less about always having my phone with me and fully charged at all times. 

My old school spanish phone

My educational background made some of an impact on my ability to perform on my project. Being a senior in the engineering program with some internship experience helped me feel pretty comfortable with my ability to do well in the program. This project was not incredibly technical though so I do think underclassman would have been just fine with it as well. I think that after all the engineering classes I have taken so far, I knew how to manage my time with the project and also how to work individually. My mentor was very busy so she didn’t have time to explain every tiny thing to me so I had to be able to learn on my own.

This is me and my mentor on the final presentation day

I didn’t have many challenges with the differences in educational training. I really liked the mix of educational backgrounds that were chosen. I think it is great to have people from different points in the degree. I feel like my mentor wasn’t very clear on what was expected of me and I honestly wasn’t clear for a while either. I understood we needed to do the poster and all of that but I was not sure how technical I was supposed to get. My mentor was very helpful and didn’t overwhelm me with things that were out of my range of understanding. She was very patient. Since I’m a visual learner, the language barrier wasn’t a huge problem. I would read the standards in English and then watch the test and ask questions after if I was unclear. Overall, I wasn’t really sure what to expect with the program, but I didn’t expect to be doing what I did. My project was certifying safety equipment so it really didn’t feel like research. My hypothesis didn’t seem like something I was even really able to prove, especially in just four weeks. Overall I still learned a lot about my topic from my mentor and my own reading. Honestly the blogs and reflection paper were challenging for me. It seems so simple to write but I haven’t wrote non-technical papers in so long it is a little strange to get used to.