Humans of Global Education

Major: MBA
Program: CU Denver in Spain: Waking Your Entrepreneurial Spirit in Barcelona

Despite being a bit stoic during our final night in Sitges together, I can confess that I became pretty emotional on my trip back home. Our study abroad trip to Barcelona has truly been one of the best experiences of my adult life. The connections I’ve made with my classmates and the ability to experience another culture in meaningful way have helped me shift into what Rich Kurtzman describes as a ‘growth mindset’. Rich was the CEO of Barcelona SAE, the institute which CU Denver partners with for our program.

My key take-aways from the experience were:

• Be respectful of other cultures and a positive ambassador of your own. This really hit home when visited Park Güell and I now have a better appreciation for how locals feel about not being able to enjoy this area for themselves because its overrun by tourists.
• Understanding local culture is especially important when expanding business operations worldwide. That is to say, we can’t always assume that what works well in one market will translate to another.
• Entrepreneurs need to be dynamic, able to foresee and mitigate risk, okay with ambiguity and resilient. The risk of failure is high, but the goal is to recover quickly and learn from it. We heard over and over the need to ‘fail fast’ if an initial venture doesn’t gain market traction.
• Everyone, whether an entrepreneur or otherwise, should understand his/her core values and non-negotiables. We heard this point emphasized by the CEO of GoticFerments, when she spoke with our class. She and her team was committed to sustainability and unwavering on that point, even if it meant it might be able to produce its goods at a lower cost to achieve a higher profit margin.
• Everyone, whether an entrepreneur or otherwise, can benefit from building emotional intelligence. Being aware of your own emotions and those of other people so that one can adjust communication content or style is a tremendously valuable skill in many areas of life.

For me personally, I think the greatest takeaway from the last three weeks is that I need to place more value on living my life and my relationships with other people. Seeing Spaniards taking time to enjoy each other’s company, walk in a park or enjoy a meal really hit home for me because it’s so drastically different from my own life prior to this trip. I’ve also been reflecting on how I haven’t done very well maintaining my existing friendships over the years, nor have I made many new friends, because I’ve let my work-life consume me. With that, I feel like this trip has afforded me a golden opportunity to have a fresh start with many new friendships and perspective to re-envision how I want to live the rest of my life.