Original post written by Yiyao Xie ’18, participant in the DavidsonIE Internship Program.
If you asked me just three months ago what I would be doing this summer, I would have never imagined I’d have the opportunity to intern in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. When I received my internship offer from Dronamics, a startup that develops unmanned cargo aircraft, I was a little bit hesitant to accept. I knew very little about Bulgaria; it was a country that I imagined was different from anything I had previously experienced, with a culture that was completely foreign to me as well.
My gut instinct was telling me to go with it, though, and now I am so thankful that I made this decision.
This is my first time in Europe, and it is the realization of a life-long dream; I’ve been wanting to go to Europe ever since I was a little girl in China. Bulgaria is very different from what I envisioned before my arrival. It may be because of the country’s previous experience with communism that I found a lot of similarities between Bulgaria and China, especially architecturally. From the outside, the apartment that I stay in here looks exactly like the apartment I lived in as a child.