Being a Global Citizen

I met a student this week who did an amazing internship last summer in Romania. He is not an AUBG student, but I felt like I needed to share his experience and valuable information.

Nikolay Velikov

Nikolay Velikov is  from Gotse Delchev but he’s been living in Blagoevgrad for five years and studying law at Southwestern University.

Nikolay did a 6 week internship last summer in Romania. Actually, he got to choose from a few countries like Brazil, Indonesia, India, Chec Republic, Turkey and Italy. But Nikolay decided to go to Romania because the program’s goal for that country was to achieve peace and raise human potential.

“ I wasn’t really sure about Romania at first because Bulgaria had some history and political issues with that country, so it was really challenging for him to choose Romania. It was a big deal for me to go to Romania and meet the Romanian people there.”

The internship program is called Global Citizen, which is provided by AIESEC. All the volunteer internships which AIESEC provides aim to solve different issues in the society of various countries.

Nikolay’s job was to provide lectures and sessions to high school students. The topics of the sessions were career and personal development, time management, how to create your CV, what major to choose. AIESEC in Romania has decided that they have big problems with education in the area, so they created a project which aims at educating and informing young generation.  The goal was to develop leadership skills and show the Romanian students that they have a lot of potential.

Nikolay has been a member of AIESEC for a year now. It is an organization which strives to develop leadership potential and one of the many programs is Global Citizen internship.You can also go on a professional internship through the help of AIESEC, which has a database of 12,000 internships in different fields (Marketing, Business Administration, IT, etc.)

For the Global Citizen Internship Nikolay had to go and deliver an important lecture to high school kids, so he had to implement his leadership skills so the students actually see the point, listen and learn. The most challenging thing for Nikolay was to set an authority in class. Especially since he is a Bulgarian, there was some tension in the beginning but later they got to know each other and everything worked out well.

“One of the guys from high school came to me during one of the events and said: “I used to hate Bulgarians, but after I got to know you I feel like you are one of my brothers.” It was so great to hear because it really made me feel like I did something important. When I go back in time and remember this, I feel like it was one of the best experiences I have had.”

Nikolay have always asked himself if leadership can be developed. After this internship he feels like he is more organized and confident, able to successfully deliver a speech for a big audience. The big lesson for him was to know that leadership can be developed and now he knows exactly how to do it.