For being someone who is super involved in the Mays Business School and seeing students go into fields like audit, consulting, banking, and energy, what this trip really opened my eyes to was how many different paths business can take and how different Europe’s culture is in regards to “hard work”. I remember on this trip, we got to visit a Violin maker in Italy. She handcrafts her violins and sells around 6 per year for anywhere between $6000-50000! She told us that she has a large waiting list, and I asked her why she doesn’t just speed her process, hire more people, and make more money. What she told me, and what I realized was so valuable throughout Europe was quality over everything. In this case, she takes the time to make high quality violins and that provides her a high quality of life. She sleeps above the place where she works and she can go nap whenever she wants after having a coffee in the morning. This strong focus on quality of life rings through the country and is fundamental to how business works here. Business close for lunch, yet all the countries are all very modern. My initial impressions of Europe was that it’s very similar to the US: from going to school and working, but when we got to interact with students in the evenings, they told us that college was free and everyone focused on getting a masters and PhD’s for specialized education. My perspective on business is that the US lifestyle is very focused on work and how that essentially creates your life, while in Europe, work is just a thing you do. Nobody we talked to brought up their career, so when interacting with other businesspeople, we should be alert of that fact. This trip also changed my perspective on how a life can be lived: food can be fresher here in the US, people can be kinder. I wondered what the national parks don’t have rangers or trash cans, but people simple don’t pollute there and it makes me wonder why we don’t live with that respect here in the US. I absolutely loved the trip and it really opened my mind to not only business practices, but also life as a whole and how to approach looking at it.
