Logan Cahall
Education Abroad
During my education abroad experience, I was privileged with the opportunity to travel to Amsterdam and Rotterdam in The Netherlands and then to Copenhagen in Denmark. With these travels, I was able to learn a lot about the culture of Europe and about the countries reliance on sustainability for their futures. In addition, my group met with many companies in these countries that are working in the field of sustainability and I saw different prospects and paths for potential future careers.
My experience abroad allowed me the time to travel on a continent which I had never been to before. While we were busy in the mornings meeting with companies, most days we had the evenings free to ourselves, and I quickly discovered how independent I am and was surprised at my desire to adventure and explore the cities that I was visiting. Instead of staying in the hotel or going out and finding different food or drink, I found myself trying to deeply explore the cities I was in to see all that they had to offer. From residential neighborhoods to water-side harbors, I was able to get different perspectives of cities and was able to fully explore the beauty that they all had to offer. To me, this begged the question of why I have never really done that in my own city of Columbus, and it sparked in me the desire to fully explore the city in which I live to see all that it offers, from every corner of the city.
Another transformation that took place during my education abroad experience was my perspective on how business is done in the United States. Growing up, I was instilled with the idea that the United States was #1 in everything and that idea had been wearing away these past few years, and my trip abroad really solidified that change in my thinking. In many ways, the United States is behind on many business practices, most notably being in the arena of “clean energy”, with an over-reliance on fossil fuels. During my times meeting with various companies, I was presented with business practices and advancements that surely seem to be the future of the business world, and these practices are ones that I hope the United States will soon begin implementing on more of a wide-scale level.
On a personal level, I discovered my sense of independence daily through my desire to explore. Every night, usually after dinner, I picked a different part of the city that I was staying in and just started to walk. Using Google Maps, I was able to see my location and had a healthy sense of where my hotel was, so I was able to just wander off and veer off in any direction that might look promising, without too great of a worry of getting loss. Through this, I found cool shops, beautiful parks, playgrounds in residential neighborhoods, and even national landmarks and tourist attractions. This daily experience gave me a lot of time to myself to think and to grow as an individual, and it was truly rewarding.
Going into my trip, I was most excited about the prospect of traveling to Europe and experiencing a different culture. While that was transformative in its own way, I was more surprised to find how transformative the meetings we had with businesses turned out to be. Initially, I saw these meetings with companies as a requisite and obligation to go on cultural visits and to explore the cities, but I quickly realized how interesting and valuable these meetings truly were. From companies such as AkzoNobel to Sustainalytics to IKEA, I was afforded the opportunity to see how sustainability is being woven into companies and the importance of sustainable practices to the future of companies’ health and growth. From these meetings, it has left little doubt in my mind that sustainable business practices are the way of the future, and that those who are slow to embrace it will be left behind as those that do begin to flourish. Not only is it better for the environment, but it’s also better for a company’s bottom line, and in choosing where I want to work in the future, embracing a company that is forward thinking on this issue will be of great importance to me.
Something that this trip did well was find companies that are in a wide range of industries, so no matter what your specialty was in business, there was bound to be a company that talked about your field of interest. For me, my major is accounting, and one specific meeting with a company that greatly impacted me was our meeting with KPMG, an accounting firm. As an accounting major, I’ve bounced around ideas of what I’d find rewarding in a career, and the prospect of working in an office all day doing personal accounting for people or for a company’s bottom line left a lot to be desired, but our meeting with KPMG opened a whole new field to me that I found to be equally rewarding and fascinating. Through our meeting, I discovered that there are some accountants who specifically audit companies’ sustainability practices and compares their findings to that of best practice in the industry. The goal of this is to see how companies can improve their sustainable practices and to ensure there is transparency in their reporting. This field of accounting is something that I believe I would find very rewarding, and I feel extremely grateful for the opportunity of meeting and hearing from KPMG, among the many other companies that we also met with.
My experience abroad has impacted me in a myriad of ways. As I discussed previously, my meetings with companies has inspired me to look at entirely new fields of business and to look at the business world from a new lens and with a more holistic view. Previously, I saw business from an inside-out perspective, as is typical in the U.S., most companies focus on its own interests and then consider its interactions and how it might be exploiting the world. Through my coursework and travel abroad, I have aligned my thinking with that of a different perspective, an outside-in perspective, one where a company considers the world’s needs and then asks how it can do business to see those needs met. From this perspective, I see the potential for great benefit and for world-changing innovation, and I’d like to align myself with companies that operate from this line of thinking.
From an academic perspective, my travels have encouraged me to more closely think about the world of sustainability. In regards to my time at Ohio State, it has challenged me with the prospect of seeing how I might integrate more sustainability coursework into my degree plans. From potentially doing a sustainability industry cluster to even declaring an EEDS minor, I have become much more passionate about the field of sustainability and I am excited to learn even more along the way. I am truly grateful for my opportunity to travel abroad, it was a perspective-shifting trip that greatly enhanced my experience as a student at Ohio State.
