Document Type
Thesis
First Faculty Advisor
Patricia Gomez
Keywords
Study Abroad; Perceptions; Values; Impacts;
Rights Management
CC-BY-NC-ND
Abstract
While thorough research has been conducted to assess the short-term and long-term personal and professional impacts of a study abroad experience (SAE) on an individual, there lacks no further research on how and if such effects carry forward in a student's later career. This paper identifies whether employers of employees with SAE are more satisfied with their performance as compared to the performance of employees without prior SAE. Following this line of inquiry, I investigate the most frequently recognized attributes of employees with SAE as compared to their colleagues without such experience, identifying the researched benefits of study abroad which are most notable in individuals by their employers; namely, foreign language use and intercultural competence. Serving as a springboard for future research, the paper gestures towards exploring 21st-century corporate American business perspectives as an underlying bias in respondents, paving the way for a discussion rooted in the residual effects of cultural values on hiring managers' mindsets and decision-making processes.
