By Viktoria Panteleyeva

Contributor

Switching from Ukrainian alma mater to an American one was a smooth transition for me.

As a philologist of English and Turkish, I was interested in finding an optimal major, which could serve as a fitting vehicle for my linguistic abilities. To my great joy, I discovered that CSUSM offered a Global Business Management (GBM) option for business majors. Not giving it a second thought, I enrolled in this option. By minoring in Political Science, I upped the ante. I’m not going to single out any professors I encountered in CSUSM. Nonetheless, I feel obligated to say that all professors in the GBM option are on par with PSCI professors, despite having different pedagogical styles, left their indelible mark on my mind.

Being culturally proud and yet having cosmopolitan outlook has always been my forte. In fact, my life philosophy sums up in the words of the most revered Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, who wrote:

Learn, study and discern,

And learn from foreigners.

But don’t disdain your own.

For these reasons, I felt that being a GBMer will help sate my curiosity about other cultures. Joining Global Business Management Association and becoming its officer brought me closer to like-minded people. Besides, I got an opportunity to widen my social circle by meeting a plethora of international students. I still keep in touch with a lot of them. As GBMers we get encouraged to participate in a study abroad program to widen our cultural horizons, and a number of my friends took up this opportunity and ended up truly benefitting from it. As for me, I chose to culturally enrich myself by travelling independently during last summer to a string of Eastern and Western European countries. After this prolonged travelling, I realized that I selected the right vocation for me.

As an afterword, I’d like to say that being the first Ukrainian in my family to study in the US, I’m truly honored to be a graduate from CSUSM.