X-Culture: Talent Showcase

Guest Blogger: Haren Lalchand, Nathan M. Bisk College of Business student

This is an exiting opportunity for students to showcase their talents on a international scale while gathering firsthand experience to how cross cultural and multi-national virtual teams actually work. There are so many factors that have to be taken account of that students normally take for granted which become vitally important on an international setting that we are just not used to. For example the simple consideration of factoring in the different times zones and everyone’s individual schedules in order to find a common time for a meeting was quite a challenge and ended up with a weekend meeting time which varied in times from 8 am (local time) in the US to 10 pm (local time) in Thailand.

The students involved come from quite diverse backgrounds with nations such as Ghana, Colombia, Thailand, UK, and Barbados being represented on a single team. I remain cautious though of the challenges that lie ahead. I personally have never had to deal with a team that had this much variety of backgrounds on a single team before and expect some unique problems to arise as a result. However I am optimistic that the overall experience i will get from this project will be invaluable for our careers in the long run.