It’s been a bit of hectic week this week! Between homework,
and recapping Kutna Hora, I have gotten a little bit behind on blogging. I’ve
been keeping notes on some of the highlights and have grouped them together
here to share with you!
Monday, March 11, 2013
- As a warm-up exercise in Intro to Czech, Dr. Antosova gave us each a color word (“red” “orange’ etc.) and asked us to create a sentence in Czech using our color to describe something. My color was black—the Czech word being “cerny.” To construct the sentences, we had to change the endings of the color word to match the object we were describing. From the week before, I knew that word for “street” started with a U. Looking down quickly at my vocabulary sheet, I found a U word. When it was my turn, I said, “Ta učitelka je černa.”
- In Supply Chain Management, we started a case study on merchandise management. From fictional data from an imaginary company, we had to figure out how many individual items went into the products, and then rank each item as an A, B, or C based on how frequently they sold. I was in a group with two students from Sweden. They had done a similar project last semester and were quite good at explaining how it worked. Occasionally, their limited English prevented them being able to explain it exactly, but between the two of them, they conveyed their point. Our group finished the portion for this week first. Apparently, we are working on this for the next several weeks.
- Back at the dorm, I made
some soup and looked at booking some additional trips. My friend Bryan has
an Aunt who lives in Zurich and she and I emailed a few times to talk
about staying with them so I can see parts of Switzerland. I also had been
emailing with a cousin of mine about going to visit some extended family
while I was overseas.
Ivana emailed me to confirm a trip to Berlin and said that she had booked the hostel. By the time I went to bed, I had also booked the trip to Zurich for mid-April
The room went silent. People stared at me with wide eyes. Dr. Antosova also stared at me too. Then she smiled and started to laugh.
As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew what I’d said. “Ulice” was the word for street. “Ucitelka” was the word for teacher.
“It is grammatically correct,” Dr. Antosova said between chuckles. “But I don’t think it is very polite to say.”
I smiled (and blushed I’m sure.) “I understand,” I said. She moved on to Thibaut.
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
- In Marketing, we had a small group assignment to create a marketing strategy for a water company that would accomplish the following goals: (1) Improve the public image of tap water, (2) Increase the consumption of tap water (3) Improve the public opinion of the Mayor of Prague. In my mind, I figured that drinking water had a negative connotation for tasting metallic and being dirty. I figured a television ad that talked about how the Mayor has made clean drinking water a priority, and company XYZ had perfected the science of clean drinking water, would be the perfect way to attack this.I quickly learned I was wrong.
- When I got back to the
dorm, I tried to figure out how so many of the other students are watching
TV online. Hulu and Netflix aren’t licensed in Europe so neither of them
work here. After playing around with it for a bit, I did find a service to
watch TV. I found that it slowed down my laptop pretty significantly when
it was open, but it let me unwind for a bit and catch up on a few shows.
- After making soup again
for dinner, I was still a little hungry. I had some yogurt in the fridge
but I wasn’t completely sure I wanted to do more dishes so that I had a
clean spoon. I’d already eaten my soup with a fork, so I figured it was
time to answer the age old question: Can yogurt be eaten with a fork? The
answer is yes.
- Again, Tuesdays are student
nights at the clubs but with the trips I have coming up, I am trying to
get ahead on some studying. I stayed in and worked on homework, as well as
started to proofread my Kutna Hora posts. My roommate from Norway, Bjorn
also stayed in, and we had a great time chatting about life,
relationships, and school. It again amazed me at how despite the cultural
differences I’d seen in class this morning, people around the world really
are so similar.
In my group, we had a student from Chile, two from Czech, and one from Slovakia. All of us had different views on drinking water. We all also had different views on what “clean” meant. When we started talking about having the mayor involved in the spot, I saw that as adding credibility—a few of them saw it as corruption.
I did not learn a thing about designing a marketing strategy from this exercise, but I understood why so many global campaigns have failed. I’d heard of cultural differences impacting brands, but now I understood why. The understandings could be so varied and so extreme, it was remarkable. That lesson in itself seemed worth learning.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
- To prepare for my Management class on Wednesday, we had to read an article on “The Ten Commandments of Steve Jobs.” If you are unfamiliar with them, the principals are: ~Go for perfect
- When we were being trained to study abroad, two of the phrases they taught us were “front stage” and “back stage” when referring to culture. The front stage of a culture is the visible part, (such as Japanese businessmen bowing when they greet each other.) The back stage would be the psychological aspects of the culture (such as understanding why the bow is important to the Japanese.) In the Managment lecture this week, the professor (and I still haven’t caught his name) talked a lot about stereotyping. He talked about the obvious types of stereotyping (like dumb blonde jokes) as well as the dangers of it leading to prejudice (such as thinking southerners in the US are less intelligent) but then he raised a point that I hadn’t considered.
- In between my management
class and the second part of my marketing class, I ran home to finish the
Kutna Hora posts. I made a sand which for lunch and talked a bit more with
Bjorn. When the time came to go back to class, I still hadn’t uploaded the
posts, but they were proofread and ready to go online
I caught the 9 back to school. On the tram, I was seated next to a mom with a baby in a stroller. The little boy looked around the car, wide eyed. At one point, the Velcro on his glove got caught to the side of his jacket and he screeched at being unable to free his hand.
Suddenly, there was a big commotion around me on the tram. I noticed a man was coming through checking tickets. Rummaging in my jacket I produced my tram pass. He looked at it, flipped through the pages, and then handed it back to me. When I have the pass, everyone around me assumes I speak Czech. They are quite confused when I say (in American English) that I don’t understand them. - That night, after class, I
went back to the dorm to upload my posts online. The entire summary was
over 20 pages in Microsoft Word and I read through them trying to break
them into four smaller posts. After I got first two posts online, I saw
the headline on MSN.com announce that the cardinals had elected a new
pope. Clicking on the link, I watched the live feed from MSNBC.
I was in sixth grade when Pope Benedict was elected. I remember it being a big deal, but I don’t remember following it.
I will never forget following this Pope for a number of reasons. Having spent the last six weeks immersed in history, I had a new appreciation for the pomp and circumstance of the event. As the marching bands entered the Vatican, just as they have for hundreds of years, I couldn’t believe how sacred the tradition still was. What it must be like to march in that band just as generations have since the dawn of Christianity.
I also had a new appreciation for the crowd of people in the Vatican. They represented the world, and that notion of “the world” makes a lot more sense to me now. They are faces of people from all different backgrounds, colors, and creeds, but yet we are so much more alike than I ever realized.
And when Pope Francis was introduced to the crowd, I will never forget one line from his speech. “Life is a journey of friendship, love, trust, and faith.” That is certainly what I have learned on this journey.
~Tap the experts
~Be ruthless~Shun focus groups
~Never stop studying
~Simplify
~Keep your secrets
~Keep teams small
~Use more carrot than stick
~Prototype to the extreme
When I got to class and was discussing the article with Karin, I made the comment, “I’m sure it makes for a fun corporate environment, but I’m not sure how healthy it is.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I think it’s a good recipe for living your life as a perfectionist, and I think that becomes exhausting,” I said, speaking from years of experience.
“I don’t know if it is unhealthy,” she said. “I am like that and I think it just one way to do things.”
It made me think a bit. I think when we think of American “culture” we often think of the high pressure, driven, work environments. We think of people who define themselves by their careers. We think of being the best and chasing the American dream. I’m not sure we really—at least I haven’t in the past weeks—considered that work, stress, and perfectionism could be universal.
He brought up that often stereotyping assumes traits one member possesses apply across the population of a group. He used the example that because one American drinks a lot of alcohol and blacks out does not mean they all do.
It seems obvious, but it made me laugh a little. A large part of the basis that I’ve used to discover the “culture” of Prague or the “culture” of France or the “culture” of China has been based on single encounters with individuals from those places. Even in expanding my world view, I was compartmentalizing that expansion into stereotypes.
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