Below is what I submitted to the Soliya portal, just following their questions and promting:

This will be a short paper on my experience with the exchange program. I had a lot of fun during this exchange program, and got to make some new friends! I’m glad I did it. For my interviews, the general idea that we explored was AI, and how it was affecting people, especially in the music industry which is my major. Most of the opinions on AI were negative, citing issues with how it rots the brain and ruins creativity. We did think of a lot of good, ethical use cases of AI that are definitely good and useful for musical workflows. However, in the end the consensus was that the industry was heading in a worse place due to AI, not to a better one. There isn’t much more to say on this topic, to be honest. Artists generally are pretty anti-AI.

Interacting with different cultures than mine was quite interesting. I’m always open to conversation, and I try my best to understand and put myself in people’s shoes and always deal with good intentions. I had a lot to share. A lot of the people in our group don’t have a clear image of how the Arab world looks, and most of the predispositions they had about us were probably negative. Through a lot of conversation I was able to clarify a lot of the things they thought about us! I also got to learn about a lot of things. I learned about African-American history, I learned about the current Hispanic struggle, and I got to see first hand a lot of struggles people faced. I also got to talk about a lot of things that trouble us, like our economy, the current war, and a lot of other things.

There were sometimes things that might be difficult to talk about. LGBT was something that was a touchy topic, but in the enda lot of us agreed to disagree and we respected each other. We reached a consensus that both of us definitely don’t want anyone to be killed or harmed because of something like that. That was always a given. I think our group was awesome. We really hit it off pretty quickly at the start (and even decided to stay in touch afterwards!). We made a little group to keep chatting and maybe
meet up one day, so I’m thankful that I had this experience and made some new friends along the way. I wasn’t really comfortable going into this experience (I was just forced to by class), but I really opened up to the group really quickly and I had a lot of fun and definitely wish this experience lasted longer.
Hopefully I can join next year! Excited to if I can 🙂

I kind of wanted to talk a bit more about it now in a way that I was a little bit afraid to talk about in the reflection:

Going into Soliya, most of my fears generally related to interacting with people of a really different or diverse culture than of my own. I know that with that it brings a lot of differences, especially ones that wouldn’t be very amicable (towards my general morals, my religion, or just generally things that are just different in a way that I wouldn’t like). I was afraid that If i gave my opinion honestly about something that (even in good faith conversation), that I’d come off as some kind of bigot, or a hater, which I am not! Its just always a fear I have about accidentally offending someone, or getting into trouble for something like that, you know? I knew that eventually the topic of LGBT would come up for example, but in the end it went okay.

Honestly, from the first conversation we all had, I think it became super clear to me how similar we are to each other than I initially thought we’d be. Maybe that’s a factor of how whitewashed I personally am, but I think that a lot of the jokes I would make would really land, and a lot of banter we’d throw around would be well received. Talking about all our experiences, our struggles, our challenges, really made us open our eyes. There was a Hispanic girl that was talking about how the US is currently scapegoating them for the countries problems, and when I pointed out that US foreign policy is basically that but for Muslims instead, it really opened her eyes! She really saw how similar it must feel for us, and how misunderstood we were. There were also some factors in their stories that I didn’t really get sometimes (I’d just google them as I go, I remember they went on about something called a TJ Max for like 5 minutes and it turned out to be a retail store lol).

In the end, I just realized that we’re all kids, and we’re all really similar, and all these perceived differences between us just make us more curious to learn rather than wanting to be distant. I’m really happy a lot of us decided to stay in touch after finishing the course (and maybe we could meet up one day!). We made a little whatsapp group but we admittedly haven’t talked much yet on it. Maybe we will soon! I’m just grateful that I randomly decided to take this course (AI literacies) because it fit my schedule and I ended up on a really big butterfly effect to attending Soliya and making some new friends! 🙂

Sorry if this feels a little unorganized!