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greatly enjoyed. The feeling of being able to share the best of your background and see the sparks of interest in your friends’ eyes is priceless to me. My roommates and I come from completely different backgrounds and have very different mentalities, but despite that we built an unbreakable bond, and this bond is definitely bigger than any regular friendship. They have encompassed the roles of siblings in my eyes: people I can rely on to stand up for me when needed. There was a time I was going through something very difficult in my life, something not everyone will be able to recover from quickly. Being far away from the family and old friends, my new friends lifted me and my spirit and brought me back to enjoying my life again.
So now it has been almost a year I have been studying at Hult. Today, my car playlist expanded from Arabic to all the latest Brazilian, French, Spanish and Italian hits. Even my friends from DC are now well aware of the lyrics of Italian-Spanish song “El Party” by Jake La Furia. Today, I already do not notice how, but I use “Que?” more often than I use English version of it (What?). Today, when I am around other students on campus, I can grasp more or less of their native conversations in spite of not knowing their language.
I myself am a big promoter of my culture. It is in my blood, as my family was serving interests of my country overseas for 2 generations. In Washington, D.C I spent 2 years working at the Russian Cultural Centre, the embassy’s sub-organization, whose mission is to introduce Russian Culture to the local American population and those interested. We were holding Russian Language classes, Russian classical movies screenings and many other cultural events such as live music concerts, exhibitions, and food tastings. Working there, however, I thought that the only interested participants would be the patriotic, older, more traditional generation. Again, I was wrong.
Never have I met so many young people willing to learn things about Russia. My Brazilian roommate would join me to the local Russian store almost every week and regularly had traditional dumplings (pelmeni) and his all-time favorite honey cake (medovic) with his international friends for dinner. My Italian friends and my roommates are now constantly asking me to play their favorite Russian songs, some of which had even learned the lyrics by heart. Moreover, they were enthusiastic to join me to the Russian-speaking party that the local Russian community held in Boston several times, each of which we
…Today, I am more and more afraid to lose all of it, because our careers will take us all separate ways from each other very soon…
Obviously, I cannot mention every person I have met and every nationality I was able to learn about during my journey at Hult, due to the length of this article. My experiences would require a book to outline. The point of my story was to express how grateful and thankful I am to Hult for all of these unforgettable and memories I was able to create here during the past 9 months. Being part of the global generation has changed the way I think, the way I now view things and made me more open-minded than I already was. It has taught me to be culturally adaptive, build great team work with representatives from different nationalities and escape conflicts based on cultural differences.
The friendships we have built here will take us all to a very good place one day, no doubt in that.
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