Working with your Peers and Teachers

As students, we have all experienced working in groups and as a team. However, working in a group when you are abroad is a whole different experience. You learn to adapt yourself to different learning styles and ways of thinking. While we weren't actually working in a professional business setting, learning how to work with others internationally in an educational setting was just as helpful.

One of the groups I worked in had members from The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Australia, and America. I learned so much about other cultures and the way they gather and present information. Everyone had their own ideas and we worked on incorporating all of them into the project.

If I have any advice for you before you start your classes, it would be to be an attending student! Bocconi University gives you the option to take your classes as non-attending or attending. When you are an attending student, you participate in the group projects and class discussions. Classes usually only meet once or twice a week and to be honest, the final exams are much easier as an attending student. Participating in these groups gave me a preview of what it would be like working internationally and I am so happy I did it. I promise you will still have time to travel everywhere on the weekends!

While being an attending student gives you the opportunity to work in groups with your peers, it also gives you the opportunity to learn from your teachers. I experienced very different teaching styles while at Bocconi and I believe it helped me grow as a student and will translate into my professional career. I was able to learn directly from guest speakers throughout the semester in my Fashion Management class. Companies like Ray-Ban, Moncler, PVH and more, spoke to us about their missions, future plans, and their advice to us as young professionals.

As a fifth year student, I will be starting my professional career very soon and the experience I have had abroad has been invaluable. A couple of things that I have learned that I can carry with me to my career are:

1. Be adaptable. Like I said before, your peers are coming from all over the world and bringing different ideas and very different styles of learning with them. Just because you may do it a certain way at home, doesn't mean it is necessarily the best way. You may be working with professionals from other countries in the future so it is great to start doing this now!
2. Soak it all in. Trust me, I do not have the best attention span and sitting through a three hour lecture at 8:45am was not my favorite thing. But I learned so much valuable information in these classes and I wouldn't trade that for anything. Listen to your professors; they are extremely intelligent and being that they are not from your home country, they are bringing with them a set of knowledge that you simply can't get at home.