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When I was told I'd be interviewing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, my original thought was it was a suburb of Detroit. I had to check it out on the map. I remember telling my wife that I liked the company, but I wasn't sure of the area because it sounded rather small. She convinced me to continue with the interview process.

Both of us are of Indian descent, but I was born and raised in Bahrain; my wife was raised in Africa. For 17 years, I worked for a large U.S. company who sent me all over the world. I lived in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Venezuela and all over the U.S. Because of this, I wanted to make sure that in West Michigan my four-year-old son would have that international experience.

There are schools here that offer Chinese and Spanish immersion at a very young age. We have not seen that anywhere else. That resonated well with us because we are raising our son tri-lingual at home, speaking English, our native language of Gujarati, and Spanish because he was born in Venezuela.

One of the things that helped us decide to move here is the people. People have gone out of their way to help us out and we can't talk enough about it. There's this openness here to find out what's happening outside the U.S., and I find that very heartening because you don't find that everywhere in the U.S. The Montessori preschool our son attends has families from France, Egypt, Lebanon and West Africa, and we really love that. We never would have expected to find that here.

We've been here over a year now. We're finding a place here and finding people willing to learn about our backgrounds and our culture. People are very respectful that we're not from a specific mold. I want my family to feel safe and included and we've found that people have welcomed us with open arms.