The Soliya Connect Program was truly one of the best things that I have ever come across. Engaging with peers around the world and talking with them about different cultures, issues, and news around the world was definitely an eye opening experience. One of the first things that I was new to was jumping in discussions without “raising my hands”. This wasn’t what I was used to as I usually wait for people to finish talking and we go by turns. Another thing was talking about dealing with differences of opinion. I stated that I would always listen to my peers and try to understand where they were coming from. Another thing I remember was talking about immigration and my group and I agreeing that that was our group topic and conducting interviews about that topic. Some of my questions were: 1. How does immigration impact your communities? 2. What are the different opinions in your country around immigration? 3. What happens if new immigrants in a country stay in their own social bubbles and don’t integrate?
I remember that both of my interviewees had similar answers about immigrants being in a bubble and sometimes won’t interact with other people. It also kept me thinking of my own answers to these questions and made me ponder. Speaking about pondering, I also self-reflected a lot during my program. I was asked about listing five things I love and short-listing it to three and I believe I’ve done something similar in my registered university courses. I also talked about different views and conflicts and raised an important topic during my discussion and it was that men’s mental health matters. Being the only male in the group, I felt that I had the urge to raise this and I found out that everyone agreed. People usually think that men should always be strong physically and never think about their mental health. At the end of this program, I also continued to self-reflect as to how this program helped me. I talked about how it let me be a critical thinker, how it helped me develop my communication skills and improve my English, and that I can think of myself as an Activator. People might think that communicating in my second language is hard;however, I recently had an intercultural exchange with students probably from the USA coming to Egypt to learn to speak Arabic. This was also hard. I was told to only speak in Arabic and not in English. Growing up and being taught in both languages made me always speak with both languages at the same time. This was something I never realized until that intercultural exchange which actually led me to practice speaking for one minute in both English and Arabic separately about a random topic. I’ve done this to limit myself joining the two languages while speaking. All in all, I can see that I have done many intercultural exchanges this semester and it was truly exciting. I will always try to suggest this course and program to my peers so they can see how this was truly beneficial!