Professional Practice within intercultural and global contexts:

Unfortunately, the company I was taking small project. They mainly focused on residential building, private infrastructure such as the driveway mentioned in the section above. I was able to experience the intercultural and global context during my internship. On the other hand, all my colleagues were international and thus I had the chance to interact with different cultures and learn from them. However, I have to admit that I was lucky to work in this company. Because it was a small company, there was not many employees and so I had the chance to engage and work with my supervisor in all the project the company they were working on.

The world today has become more connected than before and that is due to the rapid development of technology, communication and transport have become reachable and easier than ever before to be connected different people, cultures and societies this is known as globalisation. However, globalisation has impacted us negatively in many different ways. Any culture or society would have a huge influence on an induvial and thus this might affect the environment of the workplace in many different aspects. Having a multicultural society can be beneficial to any business as each employee would be innovative in many different ways and that can play any advantage role to the company.

During my internship, I worked with people from Vietnam, china and India. All of them had unique and different mindsets and I think this played a role in finding different solutions for complex problems while working together. For instance, when we were designing the driveway for the house (Figure 1), my Indian colleague was using different equations while calculating the dimensions of the driveway and I was shocked by the method he used as this was new to me and helped us save a lot of time. If we have used the known traditional method of calculating, we would get the same results, however we would have wasted a whole day on the task.

I have to admit that I have enjoyed working with different backgrounds. I remember that one day, one of my colleagues bought dessert for the whole office because of the Chinese New Year. This was something new to me as I did not know that China had a different calendar.

On the other hand, during my last week in my internship I was given a task by my supervisor to train a new intern that recently joined the company. I was finding it hard understanding him as he was not confident, and his accent was very hard to understand. I have to admit it was a challenge communicating to him as when I gave him a task to do, he would not do as required. It was a bit annoying as I had to explain all of the tasks a couple of times.