As the world become more interconnected, students now have more access to internships and jobs abroad.

Susan Sledge, the employer development manager of Career Services, said working abroad helps students look into another culture, along with gaining communication and problem solving skills.

Sledge said with advancements in technology, students now have an even greater opportunity to look abroad for internships and jobs.

“Companies of all sizes are better able to conduct business without geographic restrictions,” she said. “[Working abroad] also broadens out the ‘big picture’ that only enhances our creativity and aids in strategic planning.”

Some students at TCU have taken advantage of such internship opportunities.

Lainey Godwin, a senior political science major, said her internship experience with Makarios International in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic was an amazing opportunity to see how a developing country works.

“I worked primarily at the school that Makarios started in one of the poorer areas,” she said. “Getting to play with the kids was such a blessing to see their beautiful, smiling, loving faces every day.”

Godwin said working with the Dominican and Haitian staff helped her see how hard people in developing countries work and how they still find joy in their jobs.

Godwin said the only difficulties with working in another country were struggling through the entire summer without air conditioning and having to deal with the native spiders.

Godwin said, despite the spiders, working in a foreign country helped her gain more cultural awareness.

“In the world today, which is becoming such a global and interconnected community, the more cultural awareness you have, the better,” she said.

Andrew Wildish, a sophomore finance and accounting major, said he went back to his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica to work.

Wildish spent the summer working for a private equity firm, Scotiabank. He said he noticed there were a lot of opportunities in Jamaica for college-educated students.

“I was not getting coffee for employees. I was doing real work,” he said. “I was publishing reports for clients, and the [managers] trusted me with jobs that they were doing themselves.”

This upcoming summer, Wildish said he will likely try to get his first internship in the U.S. because he wants to see how business in another country operates.

Wildish said he likes that U.S. companies are more horizontal and transparent, rather than businesses in Jamaica, which are run on a top-down structure.

Sledge said any students interested in working abroad should visit the Going Global online database, which contains specific employment opportunities in more than 80 locations worldwide.