Soliya Reflection

Throughout the semester, I have joined different zoom sessions. Two sessions with students in Zan’s class from another university, and 4 sessions on the connect program in Soliya. The first session with Zan’s class was the first time I joined an international meeting. I was able to communicate with students outside my country with different cultures and backgrounds. In the first session, I can recall that I was with a student from the US and we kept talking about our majors. Moreover, another activity we did in the class was stereotypes and we were given anonymous google slides. I can remember when I said that “I am Egyptian but I don’t have a camel”. 

The main sessions were on a program called Soliya. At the beginning, the first session was breaking the ice and getting to know each other. I was able to have two new friends from my breakout room. In the breakout room all of us were from arab countries, so we had many similarities in our backgrounds, even, we added each other on social media accounts. We were able to find common things between us, such as Ramadan in the time we had classes, we were fasting. What’s different in the Connect program is that we had people from all over the world. We had students from each continent, although we were only about nine students. Meeting people from different backgrounds and beliefs made me explore new ideas and thinking. What made the conversation better is that no one knew the other, so all of us were able to say our ideas without feeling that we were being judged. What I was able to learn from the dialogue was that while speaking publicly, I should not prepare what I am going to say, I should have the ideas and talk and keep going. This clue, I am going to use in my future presentations because while presenting I used to stop because I feel that I have to not stop talking while presenting. I feel that in order to have constructive communication, people should accept each other. If anyone has a different point of view, they could share it in a way which will not hurt the speaker in any kind or keep it. Finally, I had a new experience attending the sessions. They helped me explore new cultures and identities.