Last Evaluation…

Being an Erasmus student, this project, and in fact the whole class, meant a whole different thing for me than for the others. The culture I was exploring wasn’t the American culture, but really more the Italian, which I knew so little about, as I found out when I came.

Working with Italian peers and talking about cultural issues twice a week really brought the inside of the Italian culture closer to me.

To be specific of what I actually learnt, I have to mention one of the biggest achievements of this year, finally understanding the university system here in Italy. I came here with not really thinking about the differences I will have to come across. I simply thought that since both CZ and Italy are in Europe, stand on the same cultural pillars and really aren’t so far from each other, not to mention many of my previous visits here and friendships with many Italians from time before, nothing will be so dramatically shocking. As it was shown the opposite was the truth and I, as everyone else, had to go through the famous cultural shock.

One of the biggest problems as in fact to understand the system of the university here. Luckily my group chose to explore the differences between university system in the USA and Italy, so I had the chance to really go deep into this issue and finally got it.
If there is anyone who ever gets in the same situation as I did, look at this page, things might get clearer:)!

Apart from that I learnt a lot of new expressions, thought of things that I would probably never make myself think about and many other things.

Not only did I learn about the environment around me and about the differences between Americans and Italians, I also learnt a lot about myself. For example, I never really reflected on my way of working before, but when working in a team, you have to cooperate with the others, therefore compromise with your habits as well. Fortunately for me, most of the members in our group work in a similar way as I do, which is just diving into the issue and caring about the structure later, but our poor American peer probably has a different style of working, therefore it created some misunderstandings at times.

There is so much more to be said about this experience, but maybe to sum everything up, I need some more time to step away from it and get the over all perspective of what it all meant to me. I’ll let you updated…:)