Kiel Domingo, a Business Administration major at Mapúa Malayan Colleges Laguna, joined Arizona State University’s Sustainability and Innovation Summer Experience in June 2023. The program, the second annual, brought together students from ASU-Cintana Alliance partner institutions worldwide to empower them to become change catalysts and equip them with the knowledge and skills to tackle global challenges. Domingo was curious about the program’s purpose and its potential impact.
Over the course of two weeks, Kiel and a group of 20+ other students engaged in diverse activities designed to foster their personal and academic growth. They attended classes, lectures, and workshops led by community entrepreneurs and ASU experts from various colleges and schools including the School of Sustainability and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society within the ASU College of Global Futures, Makerspace in the Hayden Library, and the Thunderbird School of Global Management.
Living the American Student Life
Living in Arizona, Domingo experienced America he had only seen on TV, describing it as a sprawling, car-centric land. He grew up with English as his primary language and mixed up with Filipino and Cebuano. He was paired with a Mexican classmate, who had no language barrier. They discovered that Tagalog has some Spanish, and they picked up on what he was saying when he spoke Spanish to his family in France. This experience revealed that they had much more in common than they initially thought.
The ASU Sustainability and Innovation Summer Experience offered him two weeks filled with interactive workshops, inspirational lectures, hands-on activities, and immersive experiences focused on building sustainable and innovative solutions for the world’s toughest challenges.
“The program did help with my current studies, finding out that sustainability is the key to any business future,” Domingo said. “Many people are starting to think about the future, about sustainability in the products they buy, the services they get. And so, I think that sustainability is crucial in managing businesses.”
Warming up to the subject, Domingo continues. “I found out that sustainability requires innovation. That’s pretty much the heart of it because many ways humanity can become sustainable are unknown. We are the people that are used to researching all the time on how to do this better and to manage what we have properly.”
The summer stint gave Domingo the needed skills to excel in the future. Beyond experiences that focused on solutions-based learning about innovative and entrepreneurial thinking and sustainability for the 21st century, Domingo also learned new facets from different cultures of other international students like himself, getting the hang of commuting inside and outside of the sprawling campus grounds and, more importantly, enhancing intercultural competence, global awareness and developing a global network with fellow program participants.
