Before embarking on our 15:30 duration flight to Seoul, we first had to make a stop back at the University of Pittsburgh. After spending a week at home after finals, a return to campus helped me to reorient myself to an academic and professional mindset. During this first “Pitt-stop”, we had the opportunity to spend a night in Nordenberg Hall and attend a pre-departure meeting with the entirety of the Plus3 class. The keynote speaker of the event, Ms. Dana Romano, focused the content of our meeting on building our academic and professional profiles/portfolios. With her guidance, I feel that I am prepared to gain the most that I can from this trip both culturally and professionally.

After attending our large class meeting, dinners for each Plus3 destination group were arranged to go over last-minute traveling information and the itinerary for the trip itself. While the schedule is tentative, I am thrilled at the multitude of opportunities to advance my knowledge in the fields of artificial intelligence and big data. For example, on Monday, May 13th, we have the chance to visit the Samsung Museum of Innovation. This event is of particular interest to me because of their new product, Samsung Big Data. The extent of my professional career up to this point has been with a company called OwnBackup where we used Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to help businesses protect their data and gain insight from it. As Samsung is now venturing into the big data space, I am fascinated to see how they will organize their product infrastructure and how it will be conducive to the ever-expanding world of machine learning.

Amongst visits to New York, Pittsburgh, Seoul, and Philadelphia, these two weeks are going to be some of the most formative of my life. Apart from Canada, I have never left the country before and never attempted a flight over a six hour duration. With my first experience being halfway across the world, I am not only excited to learn from a country at the forefront of my engineering interests, but also to develop the skills necessary to interact and live outside of the United States. I am looking forward to documenting the most important parts of what I learn in these blogs and sharing what I know with my friends and family at home – Hail to Pitt!