X-Culture: Highly Recommended
Guest Blogger: Sahroon Kashif, Nathan M. Bisk College of Business student
I had mixed emotions when Mr. Muth told everyone on the first day of our International Business class about the X-Culture project that we would be working on this semester. I was excited to interact and learn from new individuals from across the globe but at the same time I was skeptical as to what their time and schedule constraints are, what level of education they are at and what are they majoring in. After meeting with each one via Facebook and putting faces to the names I am now quite confident that we will make the most out of our international business project while learning more about different cultures and their perspective on international business.
Since the last time I wrote about my X culture experience our team has created a Facebook group for the project. My team mates are from Colombia, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Malaysia and Australia. My initial thoughts were that we may have a problem communicating or a language barrier but the Facebook group has made the communication barrier easier to overcome. The time difference and schedule constraints have been minimized by using the online upload tool for the website where we can post documents for review and reference for everyone to see and use at all times. We have our individual tasks assigned and are diligently working towards our business plan. A few of my team mates have already submitted their reports and I must say we have acquired some really good information which gives us great insight on our project. We are definitely off to an awesome start!
We are at the home stretch, our team went ahead and proactively submitted our completed report and proposal on the 15th and now we are eagerly anticipating how the well the instructors gauge our efforts and understanding of the project. Overall it was a great learning experience. I have personally spent a lot of time working in professional teams so this was quite manageable for me. The members of my team, with the exception of a few, have been really cooperative and paid attention to the deadlines and time sensitivity of our project. I feel that the X Culture project definitely helped me in reaching out to other cultures and learning about their work ethics while helping me learn how to work in a virtual team. I would highly recommend this class and the X Culture experience to anyone who plans on interacting with the global business community.
