Understanding Cultures

The most important of factors when working with or among people with backgrounds different from one's own is the necessity of an open mind. It is vital that the person be permanently ready to learn and respect new insights into a people's or person's cultural rules, traditions, behaviors and beliefs. These things should not be learned through force but through desire. Additionally, one should be ready to act upon these insights. Whether that is by wishing locals during one of their festivals or participating in the festivities.

Along with understanding the social side of things, to work competently one must also acknowledge the different engineering ideas and be able to analyze them with respect to the various cultural factors and form links between the two. This may very well affect the ease with which a person is able to work in a culturally different environment with confidence.

Encountering Other Cultures

The three cases from Development Anthropology looks at examples of global competence, how another region makes decisions and discusses how technology connects different cultures. Global competence is important especially in today’s society. Projects are now done by people from diverse backgrounds and being able to understand others cultures is key. The first case illustrates this. One doesn’t have to automatically know a country’s language, but rather be able to know distinguish characteristics before arriving. Knowing that in Arabic, Tunisia is both the same word for the country and the city of Tunis would have been helpful for the travelers. Learning about how other cultures base their decisions on is essential for engineers because it shows what that culture values. With this, we can see why engineers in other parts tackle a problem. Lastly, as technology continues to grow, the world becomes smaller. Technology is making the sharing of ideas easier and is connecting cultures in a behind the scenes way.

Halloweekend

This week was another stressful week at Purdue. Exams and projects and meetings and thinking ahead and sometimes I just need more hours in a day! But on the brightside, Halloweekend is finally here!! Thursday night, I went to Theta Chi’s Haunt the Acres and it was actually scary. My friends and I did not think it would be scary. Why? Because it was just in a house; how freaky can they make it, right? WRONG! It was modeled after an asylum and the boys of Theta Chi and girls of Delta Zeta outdid themselves. People were jumping out of nowhere, masked men were following you, someone with a chainsaw made an appearance and there was even a girl pretending to be the girl from “The Exorcism of Emily Rose!” Add fog machines, creepy background music and flashing lights and my friends and I were doing our best to get through the house as fast as possible!

But anyways…

I have decided Saturday mid-mornings will now be productive. Usually I reserve all school related work for Sundays but I’m turning over a new leaf. So this morning after slowly waking up (Friday night was a late night), I walked over to Subway for breakfast with some friends and watched the football game. At first, I was torn. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to root for my state or my school. Every time Michigan scored I sang the fight song but every time Purdue had a nice play, I did the whole “Boiler Up fist pump” motion. But, towards the end of the game, I just gave up and watched the game. Now I get to do homework and look forward to Halloween parties and costumes. Yay Halloweekend!

Highlights From the Past 48 Hours:

-witnessed a hawk attack a squirrel not even 7 feet from me

-rode the Nightrider Friday night after a costume party (the scene looked like something from an LMFAO/Katy Perry/ Ke$ha/Lady Gaga music video

-got a package from home

Halloween

Halloween is coming on this weekend and I am looking forward to it. I saw many posters about the parties on Friday and the activities seem awesome. In my mind, Halloween likes a pumpkin party. I saw many scenes in the movies and animations. There are some famous tradition, such as Trick-or-Treating, jack-o’-lanterns and costume parties. I don’t the origins of Halloween and those traditions, but this holiday seems great! Wal-Mart began to sell the pumpkins few weeks ago and I saw many students buy it. I hope I could see some of the jack-o’-lanterns around my dorm on the weekend. To be honest, I think the “face” on pumpkin is weird. It looks like a ghost is laughing to you. The pumpkin becomes stranger when the night comes. There are candles in the pumpkins and the orange lights make the faces seem stranger. I can image what will happen if I encounter a people with jack-o’-lantern in the night. I must scream and that guy might be scared by the scream. I made a jack-o’-lantern with my friends last weekend. We tried our best to make the face looked funny. It’s not as easy as we thought before. One of us cut his finger, but the pumpkins are pretty.

Another thing attracts me is the costume parties. When I watched the Gossip Girl, I thought the parties are crazy and amazing. We didn’t have any costume party, and it seems strange if someone walking on the street wears strange clothes. The situation is completely different here. I saw many interesting clothes on the street. I remembered a guy wearing the dress of lady dancer and his female partner wearing the clothes of superman. The Halloween costume parties impressed me because many people choose to dress up as witches and ghosts. I guess the party is awesome. I’m looking forward to the Halloween night!

Week 11 holism

The article talks about the holism and there are three mini-cases about different cultures and the connection. I agreed with the statement that “technology in any society is intimately connected at many points with other cultural subsystems” and the connections are always there even in a different societies. As I learnt on the history class, the development of technology leads the changing of the social structure. And change in other field, such as social status, economy and lifestyle, will be followed. The situation is the same in the world. I think it is a good idea to use holism. Although the cultures are diverse, people can find the connections between them. Another thing is before people try to study a particular factor of a culture, they need to know more about other background. Otherwise, the study will be extremely difficult. Like people read a novel written by a foreign author. Although readers can understand the words, sometimes they can’t understand the meaning of the story because of lacking the knowledge of culture background.

Identity

The two chapters from Intercultural Competence brought a flashback of my psychology and sociology classes in high school; two of my favorite classes. The area I find most interesting was under the topic of Identity Inclusivity where it discusses in-groups and out-groups. It looks at how people have the tendency to automatically categorize themselves and others as "us" and "them." Dividing others into groups is the early stage of forming stereotypes; assumptions about the individuals within the groups are made. With this, the question of identity starts. Identity is such a vague subject to talk about that it has many branches. I believe the best way to describe identity is by using the terms multicultural identity and hybrid identity. Multicultural identity refers to a person’s mindset of not committing or being committed a single culture. Hybrid identity is when a person’s identity is a combination of past and current cultures experienced. To me, identity is a person’s personality. Identity encompasses a person’s beliefs, experiences and sometimes genetics. No two people can have the same personality so no two people can have the same identity.

exams month

Many friends around me talk about the coming exam weeks and every time they talk about the exams with me I will tell them that I’m preparing for my exam month. I have one exam every week since last Monday and the exams won’t stop until the week before Thanksgiving. The worst thing is I need to do the review every weekend! I prefer to have all the exams in the same week so that I could have more free time to do my own things. But now my friends have exams on different days with me. We have few time to spend together even during the week. Another homework bothers me is the project of ENGR 131. It takes lots of time and my team always spends 2 to 3 hours on it. As the professor saying, I hope I can get lots of experience when I finish it.

One of the exciting things this week is the project in English class. We are working on the community project in English class this week. This assignment is attractive. I never thought one day I need to create a video and design a website on English class. This is the first time I tried Movie Maker. It’s much easier than I thought. I saw some of my friends making videos before and those videos were always used on the graduate party. I couldn’t remember how many times I cried because of those videos. When I collected the pictures used for the videos, these pictures remained me of the days the classmates stayed together. Each picture has a story. Most of the photos were taken during the travels and parties. The oldest one was taken almost 8 years ago. Compared with the latest photo, everyone changed a lot. The hairstyles at that time were funny. I can’t stop laughing. Thanks to this assignment, I have a great chance to recollect the memories.