Looking back on my initial post, I expected something completely different from what I experienced. My highlight of the trip was interacting with locals, and my academic highlight was learning more about audience members in a community. I have never taken peace studies or sociology classes, so my perspective was ignorant. My mind was set up in a way that focused on theories that would apply to the situation; however, I quickly realized the complexity of understanding the context behind the community’s perspectives. My major is health and strategic communication, so I was thinking logically about how to create a prosocial campaign in these communities. My experiences caused me to step back and change my perspective multiple times. There were times when speakers would give me some context and influence me to pick a side, and then, when another speaker would share their experiences and reasoning for things, it influenced me to switch sides again. By the end of this trip, I realized that it’s not about sides. The point of getting to know these layers in conflict was to see the community as a whole. This trip caused me to look at campaigns in a completely different way that I couldn’t have learned in a traditional classroom. Interacting with locals and being able to ask follow-up questions fostered an environment for deep understanding. During this trip, identity was a crucial reoccurring variable that challenged my knowledge of segmenting audience members by allowing me to see that a community that would initially be seen as a group can be split into different subgroups. A takeaway from this is to remind me always to ask, “Is there a subgroup within?” and “What values, beliefs, and attitudes do they hold that differ from other subgroups that can affect my approach to persuasive messaging?”

This trip also expanded my understanding of what I can do with my future career. Before this trip, I was so focused on improving hospital patient-provider communication that I didn’t realize I had developed this kind of tunnel vision. Everything shifted for me on Day 6, during our first day in Derry/Londonderry. After visiting the Loyalist community and meeting at the Free Derry Museum, I noticed something that both sides brought up: the mental health and suicide rates of youth in the community. Hearing people from opposite backgrounds agree on this issue made it very powerful. At that moment, ideas started running through my head. I began thinking of ways to create health campaigns focused on supporting the youth’s mental health in that community. That’s when it clicked that I don’t have to limit myself to hospitals. There are so many ways I can apply what I’ve learned to help entire communities. This trip helped me see that I can make a bigger impact than I had imagined.

One of the biggest challenges I faced during the trip was distinguishing between the different groups. I often had to refer back to my notes from the first day because I kept confusing terms like Nationalist, Unionist, Loyalist, and Republican. As we heard from more speakers, it became harder to keep the groups straight, especially those that shared similarities in religion or political views. What surprised me most was how some of the speakers identified themselves. I had expected people to express pride in their group identity, but during the peace wall tours, both guides described themselves as “former” members of their respective communities. This made me realize that, for them, these identities were part of a past they had chosen to leave behind, perhaps as a way of moving forward or distancing themselves from the conflict.