As I sit down to write my last blog post from Costa Rica, I find myself genuinely struggling to put into words just how much this trip has meant to me. From the moment I arrived in Heredia, my host family made me feel completely at home. They were warm, patient, and endlessly generous, feeding me incredible homemade meals and welcoming me into their daily routines as if I had always been part of the family. One of the unexpected highlights of the trip was trying to speak Spanish with them. I came in knowing just enough to get myself into trouble, and honestly, that turned out to be one of the most fun parts of the whole experience. There were plenty of laughs and confused looks, but every stumbling attempt at conversation brought us closer together, and by the end of the trip I was stringing sentences together with a confidence I never expected to have.
Beyond the warmth of home life, the experiences across the country felt like something out of a travel magazine. During our first week in Heredia, we traveled to Saprisa to catch the Heredia vs. Saprisa fútbol match, and it was electric. The passion of the fans, the chanting, and the energy in the stadium were unlike anything I had experienced back home. From Heredia we then made our way to La Fortuna, where the hot springs were the perfect way to unwind after days packed with learning and exploring, before finishing the trip in Monteverde, a cloud forest town that added yet another dimension with its stunning natural beauty and unique local businesses. Costa Rica has a way of making you slow down and appreciate your surroundings at every turn, a quality I will carry with me long after I leave. But as incredible as the personal memories are, it is the business lessons from this trip that will stick with me.
Our group’s research theme was Multinational Corporations and Green Economy Integration, and I could not have imagined a better place to explore that topic than Costa Rica. Our visit to Kyndryl, a global IT company operating in 87 countries, was one of the most eye-opening experiences of the trip. What struck me most was how they scaled down from 250 data centers to roughly 40 by migrating to the cloud which increased the efficiency of each data center while cutting on costs and energy consumption. Their compliance manager also explained that they run weekly global meetings with managers from Peru, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, India, and China, where most people are using English as a second language.
Our visit to Café Monteverde offered a completely different but equally valuable lens. Here was a company building its entire business model around relationships, sourcing raw coffee beans from 20 different local family farms and offering two-month internships to young people looking to break into the workforce. From a finance perspective, this was a masterclass in using supply chain design as a competitive advantage. By locking in relationships with local farms, Café Monteverde creates a more resilient and diversified supply chain while simultaneously building goodwill in the community. That goodwill is not just feel-good; it is a strategic asset that makes the business more stable and harder to replicate. I left that visit thinking very differently about how I will assess business value in the future, because community investment is not charity. It is smart economics.
Café Britt and Sibö Chocolate each pushed my thinking even further on green economy integration. Café Britt, a large roasting operation, has installed 1,600 solar panels that power 65% of their operational needs and maintains a dedicated team focused on carbon neutrality. What impressed me from a consulting standpoint was their structured, data-driven approach; they track progress and build sustainability directly into their financial planning rather than treating it as an afterthought. Sibö Chocolate took an even bolder stance, paying up to three times the market rate for ethically sourced cacao and eliminating non-essential plastics at every stage of production. On the surface those choices look like margin killers, but Sibö has built a loyal customer base that values and pays for exactly those principles. Both companies taught me that a company’s values can become its most durable competitive advantage.
Pulling all of these experiences together, what I will carry into my career is a fundamentally expanded view of what makes a business valuable and sustainable. Before this trip, sustainability felt like a box companies checked for PR purposes. Now I understand it as a genuine strategic framework that affects supply chains, talent retention, community relationships, cost structures, and long-term brand equity all at once. The triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit is not idealism. It is a more complete way of measuring whether a business is actually built to last, and Costa Rica has been proving that for decades.
Pura Vida is more than a phrase here. It means appreciating what you have, moving through the world with gratitude, and not sacrificing what matters most in the pursuit of more. As I am getting ready to leave, I realize that is not a bad framework for a career in business either. I am heading home with a fuller understanding of global commerce, a deeper respect for sustainability as strategy, and a few hard-won Spanish phrases that my host family back in Heredia would be very proud of. Costa Rica, thank you. You have changed the way I see the world and the kind of professional I want to become.