A year ago, I was in Santa Clara, California, USA, with 5 other colleagues from the University of Deusto (doing a little research on my Instagram / Facebook you can know who they are), in our international stay in Santa Clara University.
[In this post I will publish the complete content I sent to publish in the Innovandis blog, since they had to remove some images to give other people space in the blog post.]
The experience in Santa Clara felt like a breath of fresh air for me. It was not a purely academic experience (although the classes and instructors were excellent), but it was an experiential experience in the broadest sense:
- On the one hand, I knew different patterns of behavior and ways of understanding life, thanks to university students from different branches of knowledge, as well as immigrants who established themselves in Silicon Valley for being the benchmark of innovation worldwide.
- On the other hand, I was able to do a lot of networking thanks to suggestions from friends and events organized in the San Francisco Bay, among others, in the TechCrunch Disrupt, San Francisco 2018 and in the Networking Event for Latinxs in the LinkedIn HQ.
- In addition, I had the experience of being able to live with amazing people, even when we had to face difficult times while we lived together.
- On top of that, I was able to contrast business ideas that I had for my Capstone Project, as well as to find small details that would improve the idea that our team had been developing in the iNNoVaNDiS programme.
- Finally, I was able to travel across the United States, and not only visit California, but also New York, Boston and Chicago.
Therefore, there are some things that I took from this trip:
- Friends and contacts.
- Academic knowledge.
- Valuable contrasts of ideas and perspectives.
- And a good dose of fun.
In a nutshell, I developed a better understanding of my personal and professional preferences, and I also grew as a person.
