The First Day!

Monday, March 15, 2014

Today was day one of our class here in Nicaragua and all of us were eager to begin working on our projects. We started off the day by traveling to Universidad Americana (UAM) where we were scheduled to meet our groups that we would be working with.  Once we arrived at the university we had a brief introduction meeting where we got to know everyone.  We not only had students from UAM, the university we were at, but other students from the Universidad Nacional Autonomia de Nicaragua.  After the meet and greet we broke off into our groups to begin working on our projects.

Our class has a total of four different projects here in Managua.  Each of these projects has 3-4 University of Maryland Smith school students, 1-2 UAM business students, and the entrepreneurs, which are students and graduates from UNAN. Our group is a little different.

Our team has a very unique opportunity working with the Honduran Ministry of Foreign affairs and faculty from the Universidad Nacional Autonomia de Honduras to help them find funding for a project.  This funding will be used to help them restore many different historical documents that have been damaged by past hurricanes and have recently been discovered.  We spent most of the day researching different funding options in order to put together a list of various funding sources that the Hondurans would be able to try to obtain funding from.

                Since the reason why we are here in Nicaragua is to learn, I want to take some time to reflect upon what we actually did learn today. The day was full of many different experiences, but the most valuable lesson we learned was introspective. We truly learned how different it is doing business in a different country with a different culture, and how difficult it can be when one is used to his or her own cultural norms. Cultural differences are discussed every day in our classes, but actually having an experience that occurs from cultural differences is when one truly has the opportunity to learn and see how he or she would act. This is when one learns the importance of being flexible, and being able to adapt the any situation at hand.  When one is flexible, one is able to handle any situation smoothly, and without flexibility handling situations can be extremely stressful.

                We arrived in Nicaragua expecting to work with a group of entrepreneurs that were developing a new product for the market here, but that did not end up working out. Thanks to the flexibility that was demonstrated through our faculty we were able to begin working on this extremely interesting project with UNAH and the Foreign Ministry of Affairs of Honduras.  We spent most of the first day scrambling in order to adapt to our new project, since all of the research we had done was for something in a completely different field, but this is all part of the learning experience in a study abroad program right? 

We are extremely excited to see where we go with our new project, and even more excited to see what else we will learn in the coming week!