Work and Travel Experiences of Filipino Tourism Students in Selected Universities

• Main Authors: Geneive Joie Carpio, Athena Louise De Torres, Rinna Samiran, Kaselyn Joyce Villera, Sharon Manguerra-Mahusay
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: CAPORCI 2018-02-01
• Series: Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research
• Subjects: Work and Travel Experiences; Filipino Tourism Students
• Online Access: http://kpubs.org/article/articleMain.kpubs?articleANo=ORJSBL_2018_v5n2_143

A cultural exchange program widens the horizons of students. It gives them theopportunity to associate with other societies and learn their cultures at the same time. This program also serves as a training ground where students enhance their skills, acquire learnings, and gain experiences that will help them in their future careers and make themmore competitive than others. Hence, the objective of this study is to come up with an output from a set of guidelines established and gathered from the different “work and travel” experiences of the participants. This study adopted the phenomenological and was conducted in places that are relatively quiet for recording, and suitable and convenient forboth the researchers and participants. The researchers gathered data through in-depth interviews of samples gathered through snowball sampling. Cellphones were used torecord interviews. At the end of the thematic analysis of information, the researcherscame up with three major categories which included: (1) ‘having the opportunity to know the industry well and improve one’s capability’, ‘undergoing different cultural exchange experiences for better development’, and ‘being able to practice intercultural immersion’. Some of the researchers’ recommendations would be to institute a feedback mechanism such as personal interviews, monitoring visits, etc. and use the output, a set of guidelines, that would help the future ‘work and travel’ participants to prepare and anticipate theprogram they would undergo.