ENME 408 Global Engineering

Silver Experience

I took the ENME 408 Global Engineering course taught by Dr. Zupan in the 2020 fall semester. It met twice A week for about A hour and a half. The class was working with students from the University of Porto to tackle various design projects. I learned how to analyze qualitative data and how different things are valued in different countries. This experience has definitely changed how I look at other countries and better understand where the other person might be coming from. This also has made me want to continue working with people from other countries and even going to other countries for work.
My level of experience is indicated on the page that each experience has. You can get to this page by going into my experiences which provides a brief summary of all of my experiences and has a link to learn more about each respective experience.
So, for my grand challenge, this experience ties pretty well into it. I was informed about how other engineers operate in other countries and even communicate and collaborate with some on various projects. It also informed me of the expectations that engineers must meet in different countries and more specifically about infrastructure too.
The whole class was to be framed as a giant team or a family and Dr. Zupan encouraged us to interact with each other. Throughout discussions we were allowed to comment about our feelings about our own country and the other school’s country. During the discussions we were also asked to provide some context to our opinion and belief, helping others understand the culture and lifestyle we come from. When it was time to make our actually groups for the projects, we were responsible for that so that also encouraged us to interact and talk to the students from not only our own school but the university of porto.  My teammates had a different points of view on the topics and how they went about tackling an issue. We also learned how other countries interact with each other and how they operate from an engineering standpoint. All of our projects required us to research and make an informed design decision that will meet the needs and expectations for that country. All of my team, including me, had to be flexible in order to work with each other especially with a 6-hour time zone difference My group did have some issues with the language barrier but through persistence we were able to effectively communicate with each other. I even face struggles getting into the course where I was waitlisted, and it take some reaching out and disclosing how much I wanted to be in the course to Dr. Zupan in order to get into the class.
For all group projects we did in that class we were required to have at least two students from the other school and in subsequent projects, we were required to have at least two new people on our group. This provided a new outlook on each project we did and met new people within our class. Before class, after class and even between topics, my class was engaged with cultural discussions about current events that were happening in both countries and our perspective on these events. Well also discussed how Portugal and the US compares to one another and our thoughts on the results when we learned about the Hofstede Cultural Dimensions and used the US and Portugal as examples when the class was taught the Analytical Hierarchy Method. The class was also given a survey or a Global Perspective Inventory at the start and the end of the semester that measures our cultural awareness and how it changed because of the class. For my scores, I had relatively high scores in all of the categories at the start of the semester but after the course my scores in affect and Social Interactions increased. ENME 408 is already online because of having to work with another school but due to COVID, we were even more online and had a slack channel. We were even courage to have discussions about class topics and non-related topics and send memes to each other inside and outside of class to increase the social interaction and conversations between all of the students.