Hello I'm David Common, I'm the New York correspondent for CBC news. I do radio
and TV, I'm based normally in New York though I'm talking to you today from
Toronto and I'm a graduate of York University
a double major in Political Science and Mass Communications
I live in New York right now I was previously based in
Paris but
I've had the pleasure of visiting several dozen
countries over the course of my career with CBC
and it really is just an excitement every single time to go and meet new people to
have a job that allows me to go
and constantly be exposed to something different and
its that international experience that really helped out I can really trace
everything back to the exchange I did in Stockholm Sweden
as really being the thing that initiated it, was the rocket
that started me traveling a lot more. Up until that point I hadn't been
all that far from Toronto I'd gone on the train out to Vancouver I'd gone
south into the US a little bit but nothing certainly across an ocean and
doing that for the first time was really what changed things
I then ended up working for CBC in London, went directly from Stockholm
came back, finished my degree in Toronto but that travel bug hadn't gone anywhere
and it's been very valuable in fact every single time I've looked to change jobs or
better my position it's that international experience which has really given me the leg-up.
They're a great opportunity, a great time in your life, you may never be able to live abroad
somewhere else again and there's a big difference between visiting somewhere
and being physically embedded in the population of a place.
It really is fantastic I would encourage as
many students as possible to do it try to figure out a way to
overcome any barriers there might be and it might turn out that those hurdles are
actually a lot smaller than you think