 During high school when I was trying to pick the university that I was going to join, I really wanted a change of environment. I went to a school or high school that was majority all people that looked like me, that thought like me and acted like me and I really wanted to go into a multicultural environment that not just only had a great education but also had a background filled with students from all over the place. I felt like I needed to build my character a bit and to build my personality a bit and grow as an individual and I felt like a U.S. was the best fit for that. I was worried a lot about how I'll fit in within the atmosphere and the program. I mean there are doubts when you think to yourself like I'm a monotone woman, like would I really fit into a civil engineering degree or a civil engineering program? And I found the program to be very, very versatile and very broad as to encompass any kind of passions that I would like or any kind of path that I want to choose to take in the future. Within my program itself there are a lot of different nationalities and backgrounds and schools of thought. My senior design group, the group in which I had my final project at A.S. with, we were four different people and when I counted all the different places that we came from there were at least nine different countries that we all came from all tallied up together which is really interesting and then that's what plays off to a great team, right? That's the diversity of thought, it's the fact that all of us had different inputs and different things to bring it to. Within A.S. there are student clubs that you can join. There are actually 74 student clubs, some are based on interest and some are based on academia. I was a part and a board member of two of these clubs planning the events and I was running the club alongside with my colleagues as well. Two of the student clubs that I was a part of were the Civil Engineering Honor Society Club and the American Society of Civil Engineering A.S. Student Chapter. The clubs not only helped me have a great time with my friends, connect more with my community, connect more with my students, civil engineering colleagues but also it really gave me a big, big window of opportunity to connect with the industries within the UAE. Plan a lot of events that have to do directly with a lot of companies that are civil engineering based not only within the UAE but also international. We networked with a lot of different universities by throwing school, university-wide competitions and also I had an opportunity to travel to the U.S. and attend a conference on behalf of my club representing A.S.C. Senior Chapter. We have a lot of students partnering up with different companies that help them within their senior design project that help them lend them the space, the materials, the tools, the testing that they need. I myself worked with Adoptek in my senior design project so they lent us all the things that we needed like the concrete materials and supplies as well as they helped us with the testing and by that I got to know a lot of people in the company and I had to, I built a lot of strong connections and I built a lot of strong ties. My university experience and my academia helped me a lot during my internships not only in terms of technicalities but also stock skills.