Please describe any travel or experiences that have prepared you for the Global Engineering RAP. This can include international travel and study abroad or any travel or experiences within the US that have showed you new perspectives, cultures or languages. If you have not had the chance yet to travel, please share where you would like to travel and why. I am extremely fortunate, to have been able to start traveling before I was able to walk. I was one when my parents took me on a trip to Germany, Finland, and Poland. Even though I was little, this is where my love and appreciation for different cultures started. Since then, I have traveled and crossed the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans many times, traveling with my parents to China, Switzerland, and England. In addition, although my primary language is English; since both of my parents are from Poland, I started speaking Polish at home very early on and quickly became fluent. Learning Polish provided me with the opportunity to communicate with other children when visiting Poland and allowed me to learn a tremendous amount about different people and cultures. Seeing old castles, historical towns, salt mines, and museums in Poland and being able to read and listen to the tours in Polish, taught me how important it is to learn a language to immerse oneself in a culture, and how the history and culture of someone, can bring insight into their values. Furthermore, in elementary school, I started learning Spanish, which I fell in love with. Later on, that created an opportunity to travel abroad to Mexico and build a school for poor, underserved children, which was a good language experience, but also eye-opening to how fortunate I was and how difficult life could be. Building my knowledge of Spanish led to me earning a bronze and silver medal in the National Spanish Exam in the US, moreover, last summer I was fortunate enough to study Spanish in Granada, Spain, where I was given a certificate that would enable me to study at any Spanish institution. More recently, during one of my trips to Poland, despite having good grammar and vocabulary, I still had a pronounced American accent in my Polish. This made it difficult for some of my Polish friends to thoroughly understand me, therefore during Covid, when I stayed at home I took advantage of the opportunity to get rid of my foreign accent in Polish, by asking my Grandmother, who is a native speaker of polish, to help me. Five times every week, after I finished remote work, I spent 3 hours working with her, over two years. Through this, I have managed the impossible, I got rid of my foreign accent, and now whenever I am in Poland people cannot recognize that I grew up outside the country and my ability to connect with people has improved, which has taught me how important language is as a means of communication and a way to build relationships. Another country that I have traveled to and one of my favorite countries to travel to is Switzerland, due to its modern yet historical architecture, its beautiful nature, and its ability to provide equal opportunities to its citizens. I love the ability to hike and use public transport, which is not only convenient but also very environmentally friendly. Due to my love of Switzerland, German now has become one of my favorite languages as well, so I am currently working on learning it and hope to improve it throughout college. Having the chance to visit different countries, see a variety of social economic statuses of people, and be able to communicate in different languages is not only fascinating but also amazingly interesting and stimulating. Since the beginning of my travels, my parents collected all of my air miles, over 18 years, and now my dad (who did the same thing with my older brother) and I are going on a trip around the world. I cannot wait to see many places in Asia, Africa, and South America, which will enable me to create new perspectives and learn about new cultures I have not seen before, which I also hope to do in college.