Alumni Impact: Achref Cherif
Alumni Impact is a social media campaign that recognizes the excellent work being done by FIUTS alumni all around the world. This week, meet Achref!
Achref Cherif, 2019 SUSI alumni and pharmacology student at Faculté de Pharmacie de Monastir, Tunisia.
I am Achref Cherif from Tunisia. I participated in the SUSI on Youth, Education and Closing the Skills Gap in the Summer of 2019.
SUSI was a life changing experience. As a pharmacy student who spends most of his time studying and working, traveling to the United States was definitely a big deal. The SUSI experience starts in the United States but the impact will last forever. Saying this almost a year after the program makes me believe in it even more.
The cultural exchange was the most amazing part of the program and I fell in love with Seattle because it is full of diversity. All of the people I met were great ambassadors. I spent a week with a very welcoming Pakistani host-mother and an American host-father and most of my free time with University of Washington Student Ambassadors who came to study from around the world. As a result of my time in SUSI, I discovered that I am very flexible and open minded person.
I connected well with my fellow SUSI participants. We enjoyed having long conversations about challenges that our different countries face in terms of education, public health and politics. It came as a surprise to us that our countries have many problems in common. We were like delegates of the world in one of the United Nations offices seeking solutions. That has been very inspiring to me and will be for the rest of my life.
Achref (left) and FIUTS SUSI Ambassador Shawnelle (right) working on a service project in partnership with Earthcorps.
Returning to my country after SUSI was another experience itself. The first week was difficult because of reverse cultural shock. I perceived everything differently. I took my time, reflected on my experience, then I started working to implement what I learned to help people in my community.
While in Seattle, I developed a project using information from different workshops that helped me learn how to deliver my training in its best form. FIUTS taught us about networking and helped us practice in networking events. They also taught us about how to discover our leadership styles and how to work effectively in a group. I transferred many of those lessons to my training. I also attended a personal branding webinar with meridian that was really helpful because in my country it is culturally immodest to talk about oneself and one’s accomplishments. Personal branding was a new concept that found an appreciative audience from my trainees.
My project “Find Your Brand, Create Your Future” was about professional life for students. The project goal was to encourage students to set goals and start thinking about their professional lives because Tunisian youth face high unemployment after graduation and it is increasingly challenging everyday. The project aimed to help students learn how to make a resume, to apply for jobs, to identify digital opportunities, and how to develop a personal brand. The project guided students as they set their sights toward international opportunities. We discussed the importance of acquiring new skills and how to find a place in the world’s professional market. I shared my reflections on my SUSI experience and invited two other alumni of different international exchange programs as speakers to my training. The training garnered positive feedback so my faculty invited me to organize a second edition as a part of the important national “Research Forum of the Faculty of Pharmacy of Monastir.”
The SUSI experience helped me discover new concepts and new qualities in me that I wasn’t aware of. Also, it made me have a clearer vision about my future career plans. Learning about the complexity of the health-care system in the U.S for example, made me more interested in Health economics and Regulatory affairs. So now I’m planning to do my doctoral thesis on those subjects and eventually work in this field.
Achref (middle) celebrating with the 2019 SUSI cohort.
The Study of the U.S. Institutes promote a better understanding of the people, institutions, and culture of the United States among international students, teachers, and scholars. Study of the U.S. Institutes (SUSIs) are short-term academic programs for groups of undergraduate leaders, educators, and scholars from around the world. Hosted by academic institutions throughout the United States, these 5- to 6-week Institutes include an intensive academic residency and an integrated educational study tour. Extracurricular cultural and community activities help to broaden the participants’ understanding of U.S. society. See more here.
Guest posts on the FIUTS blog represent the experiences and views of individual writers. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FIUTS or any organizations or institutions affiliated with our programs.
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