As I tweeted a few days back, one of the main reasons that I came to USC was in order to see more of the world.
https://twitter.com/ZTakeo/status/310558953425739776
With my junior year winding down, I can honestly say that USC has fulfilled this desire. There’s no other way to describe USC other than global. With global initiatives across all of the schools, USC is genuinely pushing to provide its students with more opportunities to travel and expand their worldviews. Over the past year, USC has opened an overseas office in Brazil and announced a new World Bachelor in Business Program, allowing students to study at USC, Milan, and Hong Kong over the span of their undergraduate degree.
When I first got to USC freshman year, I remember discovering how much USC promotes study abroad, even to engineers. Each semester Viterbi holds its own Study Abroad fair in RTH. After checking out the opportunities at the fair and talking with my academic counselor, I quickly learned that I would have many opportunities to study abroad. I ultimately decided on studying abroad in Argentina through the Spanish department. I decided to not go through an engineering study abroad program because I wanted to become more immersed in the language and not have to take engineering classes. Read more about my abroad experience here.
Checking out the San Telmo feria
La bombonera, the stadium of the Boca Jrs.
The USC students at the Universidad de Belgrano, where we took classes
Iguazu Falls. ¡Que bonita!
In addition to summer study abroad, I’ve also been able to travel in Honduras through Engineers Without Borders. EWB has been a great way to see a country that many people will never visit in their entire life, while also doing rewarding and stimulating engineering projects in conjunction with a local community.
Posing after finishing the support columns for the rainwater catchment system.
The pump site of the La Estanzuela project.
Taking measurements for the support column’s base.
I think my last week best sums up USC as Global. I was fortunate enough to be selected to represent Viterbi at the Global Grand Challenges Summit held in London over the past week. Along with Will McGarey, I flew to London and attended the conference from Monday – Wednesday, participating in a student business and innovation competition and hearing some of the top minds across several different fields address the 14 Grand Challenges identified by the National Academy of Engineering. USC has been instrumental in developing the grand challenges program and was one of three colleges to begin the college program.
https://twitter.com/ZTakeo/status/311429248449646592
https://twitter.com/DeanYortsos/status/311948263827853312
https://twitter.com/ZTakeo/status/311499475795472384
I’m gonna close out the blog post talking about iPodia, since I just bought my ticket to South Korea and am anxiously awaiting the 2 week trip at the end of the semester. iPodia is a global, interactive class that studies Global Innovation. What makes iPodia unique, though, is that every week when attend class, students from Technion University in Israel, Aachen University in Germany, KAIST in Korea, and PKU in Beijing all video conference into the class and watch the lecture with us. Our homework involves working on team based projects, where each team consists of a couple USC students and students from the other universities. The class has been a blast and an extremely interesting, unorthodox approach to learning that I hope becomes more common in the future. At the end of the semester we will all meet up in Korea to complete our final projects as well as attend the USC Global Conference.
Hope you’ve found the post helpful! Now it’s off to Florida for spring break. Until next time,
–Zach
