X-Culture: Putting it all in Perspective

Guest Blogger: Brian Patterson, Nathan M. Bisk College of Business student

Hello, my name is Brian Patterson and I’m a graduating senior studying at Florida Tech, majoring in Information Systems. This semester I’m taking International Business, where our class in Melbourne, Florida, America is grouping up with about a dozen other schools around the world in a cross-cultural project assignment, where we will be choosing a company and using our knowledge of International Business to propose international growth.

First, I’ll tell you a little about myself and my international background, before going on to my impressions of my teammates and the project on the whole. I am a Korean American – my mother hails from Pyongtaek, South Korea and my father from a small town in Pennsylvania, America. They met while he was in the American military stationed in Korea, and from then on took my sister and I on adventures across the globe.

I’ve lived in Germany and Japan due to my father’s service, for four years each, and while stationed in each country have visited dozens of countries in Europe and Asia, including Great Britain, France, Czech Republic, Guam, Spain, Amsterdam and others. I found this international experience to be very rewarding in my personal life and by growing business life, as I’ve gained the ability to more easily accept and become interested in different cultures and why people live the way they do.

I find the Cross Culture project to be an interesting one, and there is much potential to learn about different cultures and how we will work together, taking each other’s cultural differences into account. I have five teammates excluding myself: they are from Ghana,  Colombia, Thailand, UK, and  Barbados. I’m interested in how we will interact together, especially if there are any cultural phenomena that I haven’t come across yet from the students from Thailand and Ghana, as I have never met anyone from those two countries before.

I think that it is very likely that we will have a good time and learn a lot from each other about international business and our prospective cultures, and as I’m writing this, I’m putting myself in their shoes and wondering what they might think about me, from America, and if they think that I am a standard stereotypical American. I don’t think that I am, but nonetheless I realize that I ought to provide a good impression of Americans, because in a way I’m representing us to this group of people who may have never worked with Americans in a business sense before.