As the world becomes increasingly globally connected, more people than ever live away from their birth country. This means that more and more people will need to learn to adapt and integrate with new cultures and experiences. This can be a difficult process, because in their efforts to adapt, they might try to forget or abandon their previous culture in order to better assimilate to their new home. In this Creative Project, I examine my own transnational journey as a Russian living in America. I wanted to see how my identity as a person linked by two very different places has shaped who I am and what I want to be. Now that I am finishing college, how will my Russianness shape my possibilities in the future? In order to start this reflective process, I read 10 transitional novels to gain a sense of how other Russians processed their lives in America. I then used the insights I gained from these texts to design a set of questions that I asked myself and two other people, both with backgrounds that were similar to my own. Based on these discussions, I gained a greater appreciation for how my Russianness could be a real strength as I chart my future path in life.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an international impact since the novel coronavirus first surfaced in late 2019. Since then, different countries have taken different approaches to try and limit transmissions and deaths. While this is seemingly unprecedented in modern day times, many pandemics, or plagues, have happened relatively frequently in history. This paper examines three historical plagues through the lens of social psychologist Geert Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions to distinguish between cultures: power distance, individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity, uncertainty avoidance, long term orientation and indulgence versus restraint. This paper then applies these dimensions to the modern day U.S. and South Korea, two countries who have had different success in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. Through these dimensions, this paper aims to explain a factor in why South Korea has had better results than the U.S. It also recognizes that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are not the only factor to affect the pandemic, and explores political influences in America through the lens of Henry David Thoreau and John Dewey. Overall, this paper argues that the U.S. has been unsuccessful in taming the pandemic because of certain cultural dimensions, such as more an individualist and indulgent culture, and its unstable and divisive political climate. Given this, the United States has a hopeful, yet arduous path moving forward with COVID-19 and future pandemics.