For the digital literacy narrative, I really wanted to touch on my experiences living abroad and the technological challenges that I dealt with when living outside of America. After high school, I decided to take a gap year and move out of the country to gain some new perspective before starting college. One of the first things I dealt with upon landing was not being able to access streaming services such as Hulu, Disney plus, and HBOmax because they weren’t available in the region I was in. This was new for me because living in America we easily have online access to all of these sites. I eventually did some research into VPNs and connected to the internet through a VPN. What initially started as an endeavor so I could watch Wizards of Waverly Place on Disney plus (LOL) eventually turned into a fascination with internet privacy. I hope to go more in detail in the literacy narrative about the process of learning about internet privacy.
Another topic I’m hoping to discuss is my experience at a real estate internship when I lived abroad. The internship I had was a super cool experience but definitely daunting considering I would be stepping into an office of people working at a luxury real estate agency and I have never worked in real estate and the fact that I was not familiar with how real estate worked in the country I was in. My job in the office was dealing with all of the computer stuff including finding new listings in the neighborhoods we covered, putting out ads, finetuning the website, and posting listings on the website. To do all of this we used a database that I was completely unfamiliar with. Every listing and every ad when through this company’s database to keep track of what apartments and homes were sold, being looked at or on the market, and to generally keep track of the business as a whole. It took a while for me to understand this company database but eventually, I became super familiar with it, and using it became a part of my daily routine!
Both of these were important experiences that added a lot to my year abroad as a whole and I hope to write about both experiences separately but also how they converge and add to my digital literacy as a whole.