I pursued the spring semester of my sophomore year at Indiana University’s (IU) Kelley School of Business. Located in the beautiful Bloomington Indiana, IU is the home to over forty-five thousand students. These students span across 64 majors in 24 different areas of study. While IU is famous for its business programs and school of music, it also has diverse majors such as Slavic East European Languages & Cultures. As part of the exchange program, sixteen Students were selected from over 15 different countries including Korea, Kazakhstan, Spain, Netherlands, England and Australia. During my time at Indiana University, I interacted with a diverse student body ranging from ballet students, to Olympian swimmers.

During my time at IU, I took the maximum allowed number of business courses from the Kelley School of Business, each one dealing with a different subcategory of a business major. This totaled to 18 credits (6 courses), making it an intellectually challenging semester. One example of this is the course F300: Consumer behavior, where we learnt about the various tactics used by a marketer to influence customers, both consciously and subconsciously. This made me aware of the various decisions, both rational and irrational that I make as an aware customer on a daily basis. It also helped me understand how I can use this newly gained knowledge to make better purchasing decisions for purchases at various price points and functionality.

I also learned new and novel concepts in other classes, such as Exploring Entrepreneurship, Operations management, and Integrated Marketing and Communication (IMC).

IU has a vibrant and warm student community outside the classroom. Being an extremely diverse community with students from around the world, cultural differences are welcomed and students learn from each other’s cultures. As a community, cultural differences were embraced. This made it an extremely conducive environment to make friends in a quick and efficient manner.

I joined the university swim club where students met thrice a week with a professional instructor to enhance their swimming skills. I met people of various skill levels ranging from amateurs all the way up-to Olympians. I also participated in other sports such as soccer, basketball and volleyball, along with my fellow exchange students. I participated in various internal events such as Kelley Day and Little 500.

I was also introduced to the concept of Fraternities and Sororities. These are completely autonomous student organizations, where students in these organizations lived together in a house and worked as a brotherhood/sisterhood with the sole purpose of personal development of the various brothers/sisters of the fraternity/sorority. This was a new and novel experience.

In conclusion, I cherished my time at Indiana University. It was an inspiring journey with many new learnings. I crossed paths with people from extremely diverse walks of life. Most importantly, I made lifelong bonds with exchange students from various other parts of the world, many of whom I hope to meet again shortly.