Harvey Scholar Travels - Ronald in London

A few summers ago, I went and took my first trip that began my love for traveling. I had done a lot of traveling within the United States before the Summer of 2017, but I had never gone out of country and thank Hugh and Michelle for the opportunity to do so.  

  

As a student that is very business oriented, Mines doesn't offer a large range of courses for me to take - so I decided to try and take an interesting course abroad in order to supplement my education. With that, I spent a month in London while I took a class on Alternative Investments at the London School of Economics.  

  

To distill most of my trip, I spent a portion of every weekday in a lab as well as a lecture in order to try and get through the material so a good portion of my time was already planned out for me. In terms of the class, I was able to get better with excel for uses in data and financial analysis as well as getting a better understanding of hedge funds, venture capital and investment risk.  

  

But other than that, I spent a great deal of time traveling around the city. The first thing I thought when I got into London was that "wow I hope I don't forget the driving side of the road is different here" (but there were great arrows on the floor of every crosswalk that reminded me) and that most of the buildings around me were probably older than the country that I was from. So I kept that in the back of my head as I was touring the city and walking in and out of places.  

  

Some of my highlights of the trip were meeting some cool people who weren't necessarily in my classes, but they were all pretty business oriented which is vastly different than the people at Mines. This made for some fun conversations and different viewpoints from people around the world about what's going on. I was also able to snag some cool photos throughout my trip of the London Eye as well as some photos along one of the bridges.   

  

The notable things in terms of food I had there were fish and chips as well as Sunday Roast. I found a place nearby to where I was staying and ended up eating there almost every other day for lunch (good deal and nice people and great fish and chips). As I was talking to and getting to know the owner, the one funny thing that I keep with me from it is that he pointed out if you asked an American what they "were," they would give you a long distillation of where their families were from and every 1/4-1/8th part German that they were. I just found it entertaining because I never found it too weird until they pointed it out.  

  

In terms of my first trip abroad, I learned quite a few things from it. I took an international trip alone and had to figure out how to basically function where everything is slightly different than what I was used to. For me, I was glad that I chose an English speaking country for the first experience. I do wish that I did more on my trip out there and I blame it a bit to do with the class, but it did open my eyes to the larger world around me as well as make me hungry for more traveling. I can say that this trip was what really jump started my want to actively travel and visit the world (preferably without something super constraining like classes).