Colombia Summer of 2019
In the summer of 2019 I made the decision to go study abroad to fulfill a requirement to be able to graduate, but the most important reason I decided to do this was to live a new experience and get out of my comfort zone. I decided to travel to Colombia in the summer of 2019 and attended La Salle University in Bogota, Colombia and took a course called Global Communication Competency. I was honored to take the course with professor Dr. Gomez. What I was able to accomplish by partaking in this course and experiencing life in Colombia was to try and identify the cultural difference between their country and ours. The course helped me with this because the focus of the course was to make connections between culture and language and the how this was important in society. Defining culture and language is very challenging because everyone has their unique traditions and ways of expressing themselves. For instance, I had to adjust to the way people talked in Colombia. For them using the word “hijoeputa” it was something normal, but now in my country of origin if we say that we would be offending the other person and things could have gotten out had. Adapting to their way of expressing themselves did cause a challenge but after a couple days it seemed normal to me since most people were using while they held a conversation with someone. This course was able to help me understand the importance of culture and language and at the end I was able to do a presentation on how my experience was in Colombia compared to my home country. I was able to share this with the class in this presentation and talked about the experience I had while I was studying abroad and sharing many moments with some wonderful people.