Meet Reagan Johnson

Two weeks after Reagan Johnson arrived in Stockholm from Orlando, Florida, she had already worn her warmest clothes. "It's cold in September! In Florida, we'd still be going to the beach on weekends," says Johnson, 29, who is in Sweden as a GROW participant for three months, working at Bonnier Group Agency (BGA).

In the U.S., she works as the online editor for Caribbean Travel & Life, managing the brand's website and social media. At Bonnier Group Agency, a part of Bonnier that was created specifically to handle the foreign and film rights for the Bonnier publishing houses in Sweden, she is doing something quite different.

"My team reads manuscripts and selects the ones that they think have the most potential internationally;" says Johnson. "Then they work with the authors and translators to publish the same books in other countries or turn them into films. Right now, I'm helping to edit and rewrite a lot of the U.S. and British versions of author bios and book synopses so that the BGA agents will have sales and marketing materials for their most popular titles."

Not everything Johnson does is completely different, however. "I'm also going to be helping BGA set up a business-to-business Facebook page for their authors and other agents to use, and I'll be helping to redesign the function of their web site," she says.

Even though it's only been a little over a month, Johnson has found the experience rewarding. "It's easy to fall into a routine at the office, but coming to Stockholm and working on new projects with new people has been so energizing already," she says.

And Johnson has powerful words for anyone considering making the GROW switch: "You may not find your exact position available in the program, but think of the skills you have - and the skills you want to improve - and see which GROW positions are a good fit for that," she says. "My position here is completely different from what I do at home, but there are enough parallels that I believe I can do this job well. And because it's something new and different for me, it's challenging me to learn and adapt and actually GROW here, and that's really what the program is all about."