Build International Skills

Build International Skills

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Being a truly international person requires more than just wanderlust! Your international skill set will set you apart from the crowd. Achieving career success in our globalized world depends on your adaptability and cross-cultural competencies. It’s easy to become proficient at describing cultures professionally (including your own home culture) and open the door to a world of career possibilities!

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More Top Tips and Inspiring Quotes
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I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education. ”
David Rockefeller, philanthropist
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Travel teaches toleration. ”
Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister
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I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment. ”
Hilaire Belloc, writer, historian
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The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. ”
Mark Jenkins, artist
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A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”
Lao Tzu, philosopher
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Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson , essayist, poet
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I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them. ”
Mark Twain, writer
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The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it. ”
Rudyard Kipling, Author
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I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.”
Lillian Smith , writer, social critic
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Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living. ”
Miriam Beard, writer
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If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home. ”
James Michener, writer
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Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. ”
Mark Twain, writer
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All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it. ”
Samuel Johnson , poet, essayist
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A wise traveler never despises his own country. ”
Carlo Goldoni, playwright
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The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in having new eyes. ”
Marcel Proust, writer
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The journey, not the arrival, matters. ”
T.S. Eliot, poet
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Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
Matsuo Basho, poet
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When you're traveling, you are what you are… No yesterdays on the road.”
William Least Heat Moon, travel writer
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… before the traveler sees the ocean, he feels a stirring in his blood. ”
Jorge Luis Borges, writer, poet
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To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”
Bill Bryson, writer
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...I never write when I'm traveling, because travel is a situation where I can learn more by looking and listening than by working. ”
Thomas Perry, writer
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Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. ”
Francis Bacon, writer
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Not all those who wander are lost. ”
J.R.R. Tolkien, writer, professor
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Real adventure is defined best as a journey from which you may not come back alive, and certainly not as the same person. ”
Yvon Chouinard, rock climber
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We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment. ”
Hilaire Belloc, writer, historian
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When you are everywhere, you are nowhere. When you are somewhere, you are everywhere. ”
Rumi, poet
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For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles. ”
Barry Lopez, writer
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Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. ”
Italo Calvino, writer
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Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter. ”
John Muir, writer, naturalist
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All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.”
Samuel Johnson, poet, essayist
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A journey is best measured in friends rather than miles.”
Tim Cahill, travel writer
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Life for two weeks on the mountaintops would show up many things about life during the other fifty weeks down below. ”
Benton Mackaye, conservationist
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One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.”
Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician, philosopher
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Few men during their lifetime come anywhere near exhausting the resources dwelling within them. ”
Admiral Richard E. Byrd, explorer
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A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. ”
Lao Tzu, philosopher
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You lose sight of things… and when you travel, everything balances out. ”
Daranna Gidel , writer
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No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.”
Lin Yutang, writer, inventor
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The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”
Rudyard Kipling, writer, poet
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A traveler without observation is a bird without wings. ”
Moslih Eddin Saadi, poet
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As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
Margaret Mead, cultural anthropologist
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I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine. ”
Caskie Stinnett, writer, editor
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Travel is glamourous only in retrospect.”
Paul Theroux, travel writer
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Half the fun of travel is the aesthetic of lostness.”
Ray Bradbury, writer
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If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough.”
Mario Andretti, racing driver
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We travel to learn; and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it, think some thoughts better than we think, catch some inspiration from heights above our own. ”
Maria Mitchell, astronomer
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The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.”
Henry David Thoreau, writer, naturalist
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To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.”
Robert Louis Stevenson , writer, poet
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Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”
Anatole France, writer
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To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
Aldous Huxley, writer
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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey. ”
Pat Conroy, writer
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.”
Susan Sontag, essayist, activist
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Too often… I would hear men boast only of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.”
Louis L'Amour, writer
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The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.”
Gilbert K. Chesterton, journalist, essayist
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Two roads diverged in a wood and I -- I took the one less traveled by.”
Robert Frost, poet
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It is not down on any map; true places never are. ”
Herman Melville, writer, poet
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We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.”
Jawaharlal Nehru, politician
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The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one's self to be acquainted with it. ”
Lord Chesterfield, statesman
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There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only who is foreign.”
Robert Louis Stevenson , writer, poet
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One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. ”
Henry Miller, writer, painter
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To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change. ”
Charles Horton Cooley, sociologist
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He who does not travel does not know the value of men. ”
Moorish proverb
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Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going. ”
Paul Theroux, travel writer
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I see my path, but I don't know where it leads. Not knowing where I'm going is what inspires me to travel it. ”
Rosalia de Castro, poet
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…nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes common ground, and a common bond, and we cease to be alone. ”
Wendell Berry , academic, critic
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Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves. ”
Henry David Thoreau, writer, naturalist
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The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it -- basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them. ”
Charles Bukowski, writer, poet
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Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”
Jack Kerouac, writer, poet
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Don't tell me how educated you are; tell me how much you have traveled.”
Mohammed
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Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure. ”
Aldous Huxley, writer
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When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.”
Clifton Fadiman, writer, radio & tv host
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Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”
Miriam Beard, writer
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People don't take trips -- trips take people. ”
John Steinbeck, writer
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Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”
Kurt Vonnegut, writer
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Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends. ”
Maya Angelou , writer, poet
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The more I traveled, the more I realized that fear makes stranger of people who should be friends. ”
Shirley MacLaine, actress
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All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
Martin Buber, philosopher
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Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.”
Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister
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Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.”
Seneca, philosopher
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People who do not travel cannot have a global view, all they see is what's in front of them. Those people cannot accept new things because all they know is where they live. ”
Martin Yan, chef
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We must travel in the direction of our fear. ”
John Berryman, poet
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A map is not the territory.”
Alfred Korzybski, philosopher, scientist
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Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
Mark Twain, writer
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The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land. ”
Gilbert K. Chesterton, journalist, essayist
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I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
Douglas Adams, writer
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A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
John Steinbeck, writer
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Definition of Global Competence: "Having an open mind while actively seeking to understand cultural norms and expectations of others, and leveraging this gained knowledge to interact, communicate and work effectively in diverse environments."”
William D. Hunter, intercultural expert
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...the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time. ”
Paul Fussell , historian
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The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are. ”
Samuel Johnson, poet, essayist
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For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move. ”
Robert Louis Stevenson , writer, poet
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There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it. ”
Charles Dudley Warner, writer
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I am convinced that to live is to travel towards the world's end. ”
Ella Maillart, adventurer
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People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home. ”
Dagobert D. Runes, philosopher, writer
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He who would travel happily must travel light.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, aviator, writer
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To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. ”
Freya Stark, explorer, travel writer
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Is anything sadder than a train/That leaves when it's supposed to/That has only one voice/Only one route?”
Primo Levi, chemist, writer
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We start going downhill when we stop taking risks.”
Laird Hamilton, surfer
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I love to travel, but hate to arrive. ”
Albert Einstein, physicist
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It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves. ”
Sir Edmund Hillary, explorer
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The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
St. Augustine, philosopher
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No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”
Alan Watts, writer, philosopher
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The great difference between voyages rests not with the ships, but with the people you meet on them.”
Amelia E. Barr, writer
Stories From Abroad
JJ
Interned in Uganda and Singapore
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Her thoughts on The Application Process
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I think what made me successful was not only my previous work experience, but my determination. I didn’t let negative responses slow me down.”
Read more on JJ's experience »

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