X-Culture: Exciting…. and Stressful

Guest Blogger: James Koch, Nathan M. Bisk College of Business student

Starting the X-Culture Project is both exciting and stressful at the same time. It’s exciting in the fact that this whole project is relatively new and very unique compared to other group projects done by college students. I feel that the X-Culture project is a great opportunity to meet people from various parts of the world and to better understand their culture and way of life while at the same time gain great communication experience. In my group I have students from 5 different countries including the UK, Columbia, Thailand, Ghana, and Barbados. I am very happy to have such a diverse team and look forward to learning a lot from my team members.

This diversity also causes a lot of the stress for the project. Communication was one of my main concerns early on. I was worried that communication would be close to impossible because of the time difference, language barrier, and cultural differences. Despite all of my worries I was pleasantly surprised after only a couple of emails with how well my group members understood English, and with how promptly everyone emailed each other back. My group wasn’t quick on deciding which company we were going to be doing the project on but now that we have decided I feel things will start running more smoothly. I am hoping that within the next few days we will have decided on which role each team member will be assigned and start discussing the product which we will use. I am also hoping that we will be able to establish another means of communication besides our emails. Our communication has worked up to this point but I feel we could be more effective if we used a facebook group or something similar. I have no complaints about my teammates they all contribute and are friendly and easy to communicate with and I look forward to learning more about them as we complete our project.