International Experience
International Volunteer Experience
In 2015, I participated in a high school voluntourism trip to Nicaragua. For the majority of the trip, we worked in a community called Los Campos where many children did not have the opportunity to go to school. Helping to build a classroom there and spending time with the children taught me a lot about humility and empathy. The experience gave me more self-awareness and made me recognize how fortunate I am. It was this experience that first encouraged me to be an active global citizen and brought on my desire to engage deeper with the world around me.
Other International Experience
Before starting at TRU, I took a gap year and backpacked around Southeast Asia for 3 months. I travelled to Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and the Philippines. I initially went on the trip to gain more life experience and blow off steam after working hard to graduate high school. The experience ended up being so much more than that. Not only did I gain a better tolerance for ambiguity and better intercultural communication skills but the experience taught me to be less materialistic and more globally aware. While I was there I went hiking in a place called Tonsai. I was devastated to learn that the local people who lived in the jungle by the beach had been pushed back off their land to make room for a tourist hotel to be built. To make it even worse, the hotel company built a concrete wall to keep the locals back and secure their land. The local people forced to look at this wall every day, painted murals on it to express how they felt. It was this experience that encouraged me to seek a post-secondary education in tourism management.
Study Abroad
The opportunity I had to study abroad at Management Centre Innsbruck (MCI) in Innsbruck, Austria was extremely rewarding for me. The tourism program that I was part of there used an extremely global perspective when teaching. I had peers and professors from all over the world which introduced me to new ways of thinking as well as ideas and opinions that were culturally different from my own. This experience improved my ability to communicate effectively and value the perspectives of people from diverse backgrounds. Additionally, I built friendships with students from a variety of different countries which helped me understand less formal differences in culture, such as societal norms, humour, food and traditions. While there I also had the opportunity to visit Germany and England. Exploring the UK was extremely enriching for me as it was the country that I lived in until I was nine years old. Despite being a dual citizen, I typically think of myself as wholly Canadian. My experience in England taught me how important it is to explore and be proud of my heritage and where I am from.
