International Coursework
ISP courses:
“Education is education. We should learn everything and then choose which path to follow." Education is neither Eastern nor Western, it is human.” ~Malala Yousafzai
What these courses taught me...
I purposely chose international coursework that spanned across departments at UF to paint an interdisciplinary and multi-faceted picture of internationalism - sustainable development through the lens of building construction, perspectives on health and healing, the political side through international relations, and gender roles of the society and the individual.
Global Health Culture
This provided an anthropological context to all of the technical health classes I was taking as a Microbiology major and put faces and culture to the abstract physiological processes I was memorizing. We learned about how different cultures might interpret "healing" and "medicine" contrary to our popular Western notion that it is purely biological absence of disease. We also discussed the ethical challenges where at the intersection of improving global health and respecting healing practices of peoples different from us.
International Relations
This course showed me the political side of internationalism- emphasizing main actors as countries, boundaries, administrative power, government and economy.
Before, I tended to disengage from the bureaucracy and upper-level power dynamics, focusing instead on its people and culture as true representations of foreign countries. However, this class showed me that when countries interact with each other (through war, commerce, alliances, etc.), the government is key to its country's prosperity
International Sustainable Development
This was offered through UF's School of Building Construction and highlighted how internationalism, sustainability, and industrial construction is intertwined.
I learned about how varying culture and poverty are factors in building environmentally-friendly and sustainable infrastructure like roads, homes, or even the more industrial skyscrapers. We also discussed how technology and its spread country to country can solve these complicated tradeoffs like availability of resources vs. sustainability.
Cross Cultural Sex Roles
This class expanded my view on how oppression and power is arranged on lines of gender from very overt government policy to subtle microaggressions in society. It showed there are definite patterns that persist universally (such as subjugation of women and non-binary genders) though it plays out differently country to country.
