Su Huai Chermayeff Blog Post #4: June 9, 2024 | 2024 Lehigh-in-Milan with Professor Gupta

This week in the Corporate Social Responsibility course we discussed a Wall Street journal article that explored the controversy of Planet Fitness and their inclusive policy. I took quite a strong stance on this topic as I have always been an advocate for keeping women’s space and giving them their own space when in vulnerable situations. As much as I view myself as an inclusive person, I believe that there needs to be strict rules in places such as gyms because there are constant opportunities for rule breaking and people who like to take advantage of rules and systems that companies implement. We talked about the importance of companies having values and abiding by those values, but ultimately decided that there is no right or wrong answer and each situation is unique to one another.

In the Swain and Gupta combined internship seminar we briefly discussed customs within the Italian workplace with Professor Swain, but we quickly moved to a fascinating and heated debate about a reading passage called the Parable of the Sadhu. This was the first debate that I have ever had to make where I had to argue and debate the side that I wholeheartedly disagree with. I had to argue that hikers acted in a justified and ethical way by leaving a Sadhu on a cold mountain essentially to die. I think that I developed many new skills and I have always been the type of person to see the other side of things. That being said, this was a challenge, I do not think that it is ever justified to leave someone to die, especially for the reasons that the hikers did.

This week working at Tempo Casa was a mix of fast paced while also being exceedingly slow. The first day of the week my peers and I attended the IES inauguration because our supervisor is the daughter of the president of IES Milan. This was a fun activity, but the next day was all work and fun. We were outside filming videos in English for the Tempo Casa website. My job was to explain to potential renters the documents that they will need in order to make a successful rental. One thing that I found interesting is that every student or person living in Italy is given an identification number which is similar to a social security number, but it is much less protected than in the United States. For the rest of the week we did database entry and got to know the team on a closer level which was great.

This past weekend, I did a lot of tourist activities in Milan. My boyfriend was visiting and it gave me the opportunity to have an eager travel companion who wanted to see all parts of Milan that I have not yet explored. We did three different bus tours this past weekend where we got to see all areas of the city both modern and old which gave me a better sense of how the city is connected. This also showed me how truly small and intertwined the city is. One thing that I found interesting is that there aren’t really bad parts of Milan, everything is either a tourist spot, working area, or shopping areas, there are places to go out and have fun, but overall the city is very safe and similar. We explored a lot of the city center and went out to eat a lot which has been a nice change of pace from cooking dinner in Aparto every night. I love making food at home, but it has been nice to try new foods and of course saffron risotto for the first time!