Prompt #8 Practicing Your Knowledge

When anyone asked me growing up, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" I never really had  one specific job in mind. However I knew it was something that would let me travel the world. Not to be locked up in a cubical pushing buttons all day. I wanted to be always on the move and I was told that I should pursue a International Business degree to help this goal be achieved. 

Normally it is pretty difficult to job shadow or have a hands on experience in this field do to the high cost or inconvenience of traveling. But luckily this summer I shadowed my fathers job on a trip to Brazil, it would be nearly 2 weeks and I was to follow my dad around to meetings basically acting as an company intern. It gave me a whole new perspective on what my view of the International Business was.

When my dad would tell stories or show pictures of his latest trip, I thought it was just a walk in the park. It seemed like all he would do is meet with some of his business buddies from whatever country he was in, go to the beach or some landmark with them and just talk about how business was going. This Didn't seem that taxing and this is probably why I was so intrigued by traveling for work when I was little. But I learned quickly first-hand that this was field is just as difficult and grueling as a normal 9-5 desk job would be.

Here are some of notable things that were way different then I imagined that I learned on this trip.

1. Jet-lag: Obviously people know somewhat about how the time difference will mess up your whole psyche, but when you have to go to important business meetings people have been preparing months for and you are only operation on 4 hours of sleep sitting in a crowded plane, it isn't easy. I thought that sleep was optional on the 8-hour "red-eye" flight and it completely messed me up for the first 3 days.

2. The language barrier: This is probably the most important feature of International Business. The ability to communicate with 8 different people who speak 8 different languages. Luckily for us Americans, the universal language for business is English. So my dads American co-workers didn't have that big of a problem communicating with the Brazilian workers because English was required to learn. The only real need for learning the native language of whatever country you are in would be to read street signs for directions or talking to waiters at restaurants. Other than that it is fairly easy to find people that speak English.

3. The schedule: It is expensive for a company to fly its workers out to other countries and pay for there hotels and food. So as I learned very quickly, there is almost no downtime for relaxing or sightseeing like I picture in my head. Every hour we had to be somewhere, meeting someone, talking about something that I needed to be filled in on. This was probably my biggest misconception about my dads work in the International Business field.

After all of the traveling and meetings we went to, I have learned so much about this field and that its not everything I thought it was. However, I am more sure then before that I want to pursue this career because it is exciting and challenging and rewarding. I probably would never see Rio de Janeiro in my life if it wasn't for this trip and excited to see where else this career will take me in the future.

I took this photo July 27th 2017

Written by Carson Breault