Hey, everybody! My name is Micah Headley, and I am currently a freshman in the College of Business Administration. I am planning to major in marketing and global management, as well as gain a certificate in leadership and ethics. As far as my future career goes, anyone’s guess is as good as mine. I have a lot of interests with seemingly no overlap, so my hope is that my course of study will allow me to try a lot of different things in the business world, and perhaps, outside of it. As part of setting myself up to live a diverse life, studying abroad has been a major goal for me; I was immensely thankful that I was able to study in Dublin last summer right after graduating from high school. It was a great starting point given that I have never really traveled anywhere before. It was similar enough to America to be comfortable, but different enough to challenge me. With that being said, I decided that when I studied abroad again, I was going to try to experience a culture that was completely different from that of my southern hometown.

As a result, I chose to visit South Korea for the Plus3 program. When I chose South Korea, I had virtually no understanding of Korean culture. My goal was to provide myself the opportunity to be extremely uncomfortable, and given what I have learned thus far, I would guess that I have achieved that goal. The population of Seoul alone is enough to make me uncomfortable. My home county in Tennessee has a population density of about 195 people per square mile; Seoul, on the other hand, hovers right around 42,700 people per square mile. Take that difference on its own, then add the wildly different customs, history, and culture, and I’m absolutely positive that the culture shock is going to be potent. As for the actual topic of study, I can not claim that smart systems are right up my alley of interests. They are very cool, and I am thrilled to see a society that has integrated them so throughly into everyday life, but I do not see myself working directly with smart systems at any point in my future. I do, however, see myself working in a lot of different places, industries, and contexts, so taking the time to study something I was unfamiliar with seemed like a major positive. On the whole, I’m just thrilled to be going back out into the world to try something new beyond the typical, beyond the familiar, beyond the stagnant.

I hope that you, dear reader, will enjoy my blog posts; I’ll do everything I can to make them as interesting as possible. Reading my experiences won’t be nearly as exciting as living them, but I’ll try to make up for whatever is lost in translation with bad jokes and even worse puns (though probably not worse than this title, which I hope you can forgive me for). 다음에 봐!