After a long eight-hour bus journey from Leon, we finally arrived in Monterrey on Sunday evening. My first thought of Monterrey was that it was a very mountainous place as the city was in the centre of very large mountains, as you will see in the pic below. My first impression of the Tec de Monterrey was great, as it was something I’d never seen before as I’d never seen a campus with so many facilities before. For example, it had a wellness centre, and in this centre, it had an esports lounge, an Olympic size swimming pool, a gym, a CrossFit area, yoga, multiple basketball courts and a lunch area. This campus was definitely something I’d never seen in New Zealand before. Our residence halls were ok; I didn’t mind the bedrooms. However, the girls did. However, I didn’t know as within the residence halls, the boys and girls were separated by gender, and each gender had its own space and wasn’t allowed to visit each other. This is something I’ve never experienced before, as after doing halls in Otago, you were allowed to have all genders in the same area.
As we hit the final week, our lecture for the past four weeks had dumped a massive assignment on us which was not fun as I spent most of the week doing this. What we had to do was pick a Mexican Business, write a business plan and pitch about exporting a product back to our home country. By writing this business plan, I learnt a lot about the Mexican culture and doing global business; for example, NZ does not have a free trade agreement with Mexico, and we also learnt that if we are to do business with Mexicans, we should learn Spanish as it makes it easier to do business.
As this program comes to a close, for my personal self, I have gained the confidence to travel by myself. Before going into this, I was worried about going on my own and leaving all my friends and family behind, but in the end, it was worth it, as it has given me the self-confidence to travel the world more by myself.
To other people reading this and wanting to apply for this program, I don’t think you will be able to, as they told me that we were the last group to do this program before they changed it. However, if it is still on offer, I would highly advise you to do it as it was a great experience.