What Italy has taught me: reflecting on my first five days with #cimabitaly
Being outside your home country for the first time can be intimidating, but attempting to understand public transportation, new languages, and social norms with little to no experience can be even more daunting. However, through the practice and experiences #cimbaitaly offers, this task becomes more manageable while simultaneously building expertise that becomes useful in any workplace. One such expertise would be interpersonal skills. When in a new country, even if you know a bit of the language, most interactions will be difficult, with social norms and nonverbal cues guiding a majority of the interaction. While in Asolo, Italy, my class was fortunate enough to tour a pottery facility, where the owner was not fully fluent in English. But I was able to interact with him by using hand gestures, having knowledge of social norms in Italy, and knowing a bit of Italian. I was able to determine when the employees came in for work and when they left, which employees worked from home, and part of the process of crafting the pottery. If I had solely relied on my Italian, the interaction would have been much more awkward and difficult.
Another skill that CIMBA gave me the opportunity to improve was problem-solving. Booking places to stay, traversing the train station, and finding places to eat/explore is a unique process and can introduce a multitude of issues. During my most recent trip to Cinque Terre, I found my accommodations had not been approved on the day of departure; however, after doing research and considering other options, I was able to find an accommodation option that was closer to the train station I would be using frequently, was close to the city center, offered more privacy, and was cheaper than a majority of the other options I found. Another instance involved both problem-solving and interpersonal skills, when I could not figure out how to get into my room rental. After the landlord had not answered her phone, I was able to ask one of the residents in my building for help in Italian, and together, we were able to get my door open. If I had not been confident in my interpersonal skills or had not taken the initiative to adapt to my current situation to solve my problem instead of giving up and leaving the building, I would have never been able to open my door and would have lost my money for canceling my reservation. While inconvenient, experiences and problems like these might arise on more than one occasion when in a different country, and this particular instance reinforced my skill to adapt to unfavorable situations and to solve problems quickly when necessary. I am incredibly grateful for #cimbaitaly giving me this unique opportunity, and am eager to reinforce these skills even more.
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