Semester at Sea may be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but the effects of the program last forever. SAS began nearly 50 years ago and today there are close to 60,000 alumni worldwide in every possible career field. Last semester’s Fall 2011 students are already using their experiences towards their future, writing a thesis on environmental studies in Illinois, launching a new social media platform in Maine, and starting a philanthropic t-shirt company in California and Rhode Island. So how to best market your incredible opportunity traveling the world in 2012?
In any job interview, you should share some stories to sell your skills. After an entire semester living and learning around the world with hundreds of classmates in a dozen countries, that shouldn’t be too difficult.
Here’s just ten of the thousands of ways you can market your global experience at your next job interview…
1. Communication: Think about every time you successfully negotiated cross-culturally, whether bargaining at the market in Cambodia or making friends at the University of Ghana.
2. Adaptability: Turns out it’s a holiday and the buses aren’t running. Did you throw in the towel, or did you immediately rebound and find a way to get to that jade temple?
3. Punctuality: After going to school in an environment where the time zone switches every few days, SAS students become masters of the clock.
4. Budget-Savvy: 20 East Caribbean Dollars in your wallet. 2 hours left in Dominica. How to get the flag, the taxi, and the postcard stamps?
5. Intelligence: You just left Mauritius and now it’s back to open waters. There’s no better time to hone your reflective skills and find the right words to describe the experience in your term paper.
6. Judgment: Students leave their Semester at Sea voyage with a completely new outlook on their place in the world. For the rest of your life, you will have the benefit of a clear perspective to help make all your big decisions.
7. Resourcefulness: In exchange for traveling the world, students lose a few of those modern conveniences they enjoy at home, yet still manage to get their research done, assignments completed, and guidebooks scoured.
8. Teamwork: While everyone else is droning on about a group project deadline, you can dazzle the interview panel with a teamwork tale from Habitat for Humanity in South Africa.
9. Sensitivity: It’s important to understand and respect people’s differences in the workplace. After a week-long home-stay in rural India, you’re certainly well-versed in cultural understanding.
10. Confidence: You sailed around the world. You can handle anything.
