Arenal Mundo Aventura (AMA) really stood out to me because it’s not just an adventure park; it’s a business built around protecting nature. The park was started in 2005 by four Costa Rican partners who wanted to show that tourism and conservation could work hand in hand. Of the 560 hectares of rainforest, only 10%…
Tag: Summer 2026
Day 9: Dikes > Dams
Today, I may have seen the most advanced form of engineering I have seen in my entire life. We took a trip to Deltaworks today, which is the Dutch dike project to protect against flooding. In 1952, there was a devastating storm where water rose 4.2 meters above sea level and flooded a large portion…
Day 8: Flying Cows
Today was our first full day in the city of Rotterdam. After a hearty hotel breakfast, we headed over to the infamous floating farm in the city. Here, the farmhouses are 30 different cows as well as various small crops in a vertical garden on their sublevel, and even a cheese factory within the establishment….
May 18th – I got stuck on our tour
Today we visited an ecotourism business that has been operating for over 20 years, protecting 1,300 acres of forest that borders a national park and serves as a natural bridge between two protected areas. The revenue from their operations is what funds the conservation, which means that without the tourism, the forest would not be…
Day 9: BCU Nursing Conference
The day we have been anticipating our whole trip finally arrived- the day of presentations! Before we even left for the UK, we were put into groups with differing topics to explore. My group, for instance, was given single parents as our group of people to look into. The main goal was to research how…
Postcards from Morocco: Profit Meets Purpose
It’s Day 10 in Morocco! And another beautiful day in Rabat! We started the day off with a site visit to the Technopark of Rabat, where we met with young Moroccans from the Moroccan Center for Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship (MCISE). Social Entrepreneurship is a term that we haven’t heard so far in Morocco, but…
Tarzan 2
Today we visited Arenal, a popular tourist site in La Fortuna. We sat down with one of their leaders and learned more about how their business operates. Costa Rica is split up into two seasons, a dry season and a rainy reason. The dry season is from December to April, he was saying during April they brought…
Day 10: I Train AI and it’s Coming for My Career
I chose to reflect on AI today and honestly it was not a hard choice because this is a topic that has been following me way before this trip even started. As a university student it feels like every other conversation about majors and career paths eventually circles back to AI and which jobs it…
Day 8
Today we visited the Dachau Memorial Site. As we approached the camp grounds, I felt the silence and emptiness of those who walked here before us. As we went through the tour, our tour guide gave us an overview of Holocaust victim testimonies and general history during the time. I took note of the way,…
May 18th – Exploring La Fortuna
Hearing the ins and outs of the business and marketing side of tourism made me think of this trip through a whole new lens. AMA’s business model seems both pragmatic and effective because they have a valid financial reason to protect nature instead of clearing it for other forms of development. The adventure activities like…
When can AI do my landscaping work?
Today’s topics were quite broad, with one being social entrepreneurship and the other AI. Given the differences, we were all presented with the choice to pick one or the other to write our blogs on! Given how I plan to eventually get the certificate for AI foundations in business through the University of Pittsburgh, I…
Day 10: AI & American Eats
This trip is slowly nearing its end, yet I feel like we arrived just yesterday. Our morning consisted of a site visit to a startup called MCISE that focused on social entrepreneurship, a term that was truly redefined for me after the visit. After juice and plenty of cookies, our group headed back to our…
May 18th- Last day at La Fortuna :(
I feel like commercializing nature is definitely not the best way to save it because it puts the biodiversity of the planet at risk. When farmers or corporations grow single plant plantations, they damage the biodiversity of the area. In Canopy AMA xtreme, the production of the zip lines causes humans to clear out paths…
Fortunate to be in La Fortuna!
Today we attended a marketing lecture and had time to ourselves for lunch, exploring the local restaurants in La Fortuna. Some of the girls went to a great place where I got chicken nuggets and fries (comfort food)! After, we went to an adorable bakery where I got a pistachio macaron and a chocolate donut…
Where Tourism Meets Conservation
Today we visited AMA and honestly I thought we were just going to hear about ziplining and tourism, but the presentation ended up being way more interesting than I expected. AMA has been around for 21 years and protects about 90% of its 1,300 acres of rainforest, which is honestly crazy to think about. They…
OMINT and watermelon mints
Day 9! Today we visited an Austral building to discuss prepaid insurance companies, such as the commercial company OMINT, which is a private healthcare plan that is paid out-of-pocket. Other commercial companies include SMG, Medicus, and Galeno. They were created in 1967 as a for-profit payer. They do not own any hospitals, but they pay…
No tourists, no trees
I believe that there are many different benefits but also costs to commercializing nature. For example, if you want to conserve nature but also have people there daily, it can become very trashed, or people can step on different plants and animals. If people do this, it doesn’t really fall under conservation anymore. Conservation is…
Day 9: Presentation Day!
Today was finally presentation day! I woke up feeling pretty nervous knowing that we would be presenting at the conference later, but luckily our morning was filled with activities that helped distract us from the anxiety. We started the day with Anatomage simulations, which ended up being a really interesting and engaging way to begin…
Average Won’t Cut It Anymore
We had a packed day today with both going to the site visit at MCISE and coming back to the CCCL for a talk about AI from Zouheir Lakhdissi. I find the topic of AI to always come up in this day and age so I’m choosing that topic to write about for my blog…