I am sitting in my dorm room, one week from departure, with a great bittersweet feeling. Studying abroad teaches you many things and allows you to experience many things you probably could not experience any other way. The feelings of newfound friendships combined with newfound love of a European city, provides for a very heartbreaking story-end. Some of my best memories include 10-hour train rides and hours of walking to explore new cities with friends, bundling up in our biggest coats just to play a few minutes of volleyball, and international dinners with an entire building of international students. If you plan to go abroad, you have to leave your comfort zone and enjoy all the moments that present themselves. Soon I will go home and continue my life, but will forever cherish my study abroad experience and will continue to use my experiences to help me continue to grow as a person. The picture I have attached to this is the friend group I made in Prague. We will have to go our separate ways but the bonds we have created will last a lifetime.
While being here I took many international business courses. I took Organizational Design and its studies across many countries, National Accounts (which deals mainly with the economics of many different countries, and Finance in International Management. The most bizarre factor that I learned in all three of these courses is that the world seems to revolve around the United States’ way of doing things, even if they do not like it. For example, in Finance, the US dollar was almost always used as a vehicle currency in equations, even though most people in the class were European. In National Accounts I realized that many countries had to make their numbers convertible to a US standard. And in Organizational Design, we almost never studied an organization’s structure, unless they were American. Many of these case studies we read about, in any class, were based out of the US. Maybe this was all just a fallacy that my university presented to me, but I genuinely feel as if international business is much more simple when you are American. Another aspect of this equation is the fact that an American can travel to almost any country in the world, and proceed to work for an American company. So my take on doing business in international markets? We simply have it easier, while it will always be simpler to do business in the area we know, we could certainly survive in international markets.
