X-Culture: So Much to Gain

Guest Blogger: Clay Myers, Nathan M. Bisk College of Business student

The X-Culture project has taught me a lot over the 6 weeks I participated in it. I worked with people from all over the world including Brazil, Columbia, Australia, Malaysia, and Kazakhstan. By working with these people I gathered a much better understanding of how people from different countries work and how difficult it can be to work in a team over the internet. People on the other side of the world are not much different from people in the US. They all have a good work ethic and are willing to help everyone else in the team out. The only difficult part is the different time zones and not being able to speak to your group when you need an answer right away. The best way to deal with this is to set deadlines early so that if you have any problems you will still have time to sort everything out. I had a problem at the end of the project where I edited a large part of the project and sent it to my group only to find out that they had already turned it in. If we had set earlier deadlines I wouldn’t had this problem. Also if I were to do this project again I would’ve like to get to know my group a little better on a personal level. I think that would’ve helped later in the project when we were working together. Overall I thought the project was a great experience and I gained a lot from it.

Guest Blogger: Chelsea Belfer, Nathan M. Bisk College of Business student

Now that the project is finally over, I can look back and say that it was an overall good experience. X Culture truly does give you an idea on how it will be to work with people internationally. I realized that working over a computer can be a lot more difficult than working face to face. Not only that, but the time differences, and languages varied as well. Although these things made the project more difficult at times, the students on my did provide solid work for the paper. I found that this was one of the more realistic projects that would be assigned to a college student. Overall, I did learn how to communicate and work internationally, and I believe I can take what I’ve learned from this project and apply it when I graduate and have a job.