Valentina Contador

Luksic Scholarship for Chile-China Undergraduate Exchange

Information Engineering and Management Control Graduate- Universidad de Chile

I was lucky to win a scholarship to go to China for a semester. It was not an easy decision to leave everything here in Chile to go to the other side of the world, a 24-hour flight (35 hours if you count the stopovers) from my country, quite far from everything I knew and with a culture often opposed to ours.

I could understand that we live on a planet with infinite possibilities, but that to take them you have to take risks.”

In Chile we know very little about the culture that the exact opposite country on the globe has; Mainly due to language and government barriers (Google, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix and a lot of other websites are blocked for people living in China).

But, for that reason, I believe that there are few events in life that make you turn everything you know to change forever the way you see and think. One of those changes was given to me by the Luksic Scholarship, that allowed me to live and study in China for 6 months. There I learned many things that are done so differently on the other side of the world, that I could understand that we live on a planet with infinite possibilities, but that to take them, you have to take risks and realize that there is not only one side of the story, there is not one only one truth nor one single reality. Breaking that bubble meant the opening of many doors, both in the workplace and in the personal world.