Months before I arrived in Rome, I kept spontaneously saying, “Oh, I want to make sure to see this and do that.” I was not aware of it at the time, but I was actually setting goals for myself. Many of the places I talked about wanting to see leading up to my departure I have already accomplished. However, after critically thinking about serious and attainable goals, I have realized four achievable goals that will enable me to leave this country with a better understanding of myself and where I’m going with my life.
A personal goal that I have for myself is to expand my worldview while I am here. This is a goal that is less concrete and visible than my other goals but it is nevertheless just as important. One of the reasons I chose to study abroad was to experience the world from another point of view. I have lived in America long enough to know how they view everyone else. This was my opportunity to see how the rest of the world views Americans which would enable me to learn more about my culture from a less bias standpoint. To achieve this more global worldview, I will read international newspapers and try to talk with Italian locals and find out what they think about America. For this goal, I will have to rely on myself because what I get out of this experience in Italy is ultimately dependent on what I make of it. The way I will know if I have reached my goal will most likely be by others making comments to me about the noticeable change in my worldview and by deeply reflecting on what I have learned upon my return home.
A professional goal of mine is to leave Rome with a better understanding of what I want to do with my career. I am currently a history major, with a Public Leadership Citation and in the process of applying to get into the Terrorism Studies Minor Program. I am enrolled in a class here on business law. It is by far my favorite class here and law has always been a profession that I have wanted to do as a career. If at the end of the semester I still enjoy that class as much as I do now, I can go back to America finally with a sense of direction for my career path. For this goal to be accomplished I need to utilize the business law course so that I learn and retain as much as I can from this. My professor will help hold me accountable and him, along with my desire to excel in law as a career will be my motivation to do well in it. After completing the course, my goal will be reached because I will know whether law is a career path suited for me.
I have known what my academic goal would be for this semester since I entered college. Every semester my goal is to attain straight A’s. For the first time in college, I achieved that last semester after missing out by only one B spring semester last year. Therefore, my goal in Rome is to repeat and have my hard work pay off again. Just as in the previous semester, my resources will be my teachers, textbooks and classmates and my support and motivation will come from my intrinsic desire to be the best that I can be. I hold myself to a high standard and the thought of failing to meet those standards is enough to keep me working hard. My steps will be to continue my practice of appropriately balancing my school work with my social life in order to maximize both my grades and my fun. I will know if my goal has been reached when I receive my final grades at the end of the semester.
The cultural goal that I would like to meet by the time I leave Italy is to learn enough Italian to carry on a conversation with a local and have them not immediately know that I am American. To meet this goal, I have a few resources already in place. First, I am enrolled in Italian 201 at AUR where the class is conducted solely in Italian and all my peers have studied Italian longer than I have so I will constantly have to work hard to keep up with them. Secondly, every Thursday night as part of my cultural activity I will engage in the Extreme Language Exchange at a local pub where I will be paired with an Italian who will help me further comprehend the language while I help him/her learn English. Another resource in learning Italian will be the fact that I am living in Rome and am surrounded my native speakers. It is these people that I interact with on a daily basis on the bus or at the market who will hold me accountable because learning Italian will make it easier for me to survive here on a day-to-day basis. The feeling of having to make an Italian here speak English to me despite it being their country is very frustrating for me and I am very determined to speak it at a conversational level. When I lived in Belgium as a child, some of my most memorable and proud moments came from when I was able to speak French to a local without them immediately realizing that I was American. When I get that proud feeling here in Rome, I know I will have reached my goal.
These four goals that I set for myself are not the only four goals that I wish to accomplish here in Rome. On a daily basis, I cycle through many things that I wish to do, see and learn. It is there four goals that stick out among the others as being fundamentally important to me considering my study abroad experience a success and accomplishing what I wanted. Along the way, I expect myself to learn and experience things that I did not planning on being a goal but having an equally positive impact on my time here. Of all my goals here, the number one goal is to learn more about Italian culture and language because in doing so, that will facilitate the advance of almost every other goal I have in one way or another.
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