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Group work presentation
I had to do a lot of group
works with my fellow international and Finnish students. Because of the mix of
different cultures, it was sometimes a difficult task to work together. When we
had to make a presentation for example, the Finnish students don’t use a lot of
pictures in there presentation but fill it with blocks of text. Then they just
present everything what is on the screen. That is totally different than I’m
used to. In Belgium we show (nearly) only pictures on our presentation and try
to tell as much as we can about the specific topic. A French girl and I made
the PowerPoint presentation together and we were really proud of it. But when
we showed it to the two other Finnish guys in our group, they were not so
excited as we were. They were scared that they could not remember everything
that had to be said, because there was almost no text on the slides. We
understood them and arranged a meeting where all the four of us could come to.
The day after we sat together to make the presentation together. We added some
more text and kept a lot of pictures so everyone was comfortable doing the
presentation. And when we actually performed the presentation, it went very
well.
I think this case is a
perfect example of a difficult situation with cross cultural elements. We
solved it very well by finding a solution that could fit both the Fins and the
exchange students. It is important to listen to each other and keep the values
of the other culture in mind.
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