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. Every couple of summers, my family and I return to South Korea to visit family. While other families may visit places like Suwon or Ulsan, my family visits Incheon and Busan. On opposite ends of the South Korean portion of the peninsula, the two places offer contrasting experiences that serve to enrich my family's lives. However, even though I am a bilingual Korean speaker, I still can have communication difficulties with my family and with other locals. My family and others in Busan tend to speak in the Busan dialect, which has some different words and tonal differences compared with standard Korean. With both my family in Busan and in Incheon there has been the issue of cultural clashes, which can also make it difficult to understand. However, my goal is to continue to seek to understand the culture as well as the language.

Besides my own Korean background and language, my experience with the Spanish language has also prepared me for the Global Engineering RAP. I started learning Spanish in middle school and chose it because I had learned that Spanish is one of the most common spoken languages in the world. My experience learning Spanish lead me to volunteer opportunities, especially the program Meals on the Street, which feeds the homeless once a week in Boulder. These people live in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S where housing can be unattainable even for people with well paying jobs.