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. My parents immigrated from India for their masters degrees, so I'm a 2nd generation American. Both my parents speak different languages from within India as their mothertongues (Tamil and Telugu respectively) as well as speaking their undergraduate/childhood state language of Kannada and the national language of Hindi. Because of this background, I've grown up hearing, understanding, and speaking a variety of 4 different Indian languages, along with English, as well as learning to read, speak, and write Spanish with native speakers and taking up to AP Spanish in school. I know language facilitates connections between people of various cultural identities. Beyond only language, I highly value learning a little more about each person's culture, even if this means putting in additional effort. Since my parents moved to the US in their 20s, I've been lucky that their appreciation for global immersion has been prioritized and this has extended to my travels and the subsequent experiences which I believe have helped me grow. For instance, I recently visited Puerto Rico last summer, and I was surprised that despite it being a US territory, the majority of native Puerto Ricans speak Spanish first, not English. This is primarily since Puerto Rico was a colony of Spain in the past, and learning about this really changed my view of Puerto Rico, and I began viewing it as having a distinct mix of cultures. I pushed myself to speak Spanish while there, and it was rewarding that I was able to communicate and understand more local traditions. Additionally, when my family visited Barcelona and Paris, I personally took up the challenge to internalize and navigate the train systems to understand how people in the city got around regularly. It was challenging but also satisfying. This is a little cliche, but I really think that trying to understand others' perspectives instead of judging from an outsider viewpoint is very important. For instance, I like visiting India for a lot of reasons like the food, architecture, or my extended family to name a few. However, the general American viewpoint of India is negative due to the lack of some infrastructural systems in areas of high poverty, and this is all some people think about India. I understand it, since I’m also American; I’m exposed to similar media depicting other 3rd world countries this way, yet I don’t think it's justifiable to associate a whole region with the worst aspects of it. Instead, there should be efforts to improve these deficits. There are a lot of cultural instances even within the US where this idea is important. I imagine that being part of a close community of people at CU Boulder in the Global Engineering RAP would be an exciting experience, since others might share similar sentiments of curiosity about diversity and want to immerse themselves into the global picture of the world. Even if they have different goals, I think anyone involved with this program would have interesting reasons.