Before studying in an international college my opinion regarding culture was most likely around the top of the iceberg. I thought the food, language, music, dance, art, and many other aspects defined a culture. However, I never realized the full deepness of a culture, how much there is to understand, the beliefs, values, and emotions. It is interesting to recall how my perspective changed while being surrounded by international students. I never thought about how the cultures I\u2019ve been to shape me and my personality.<\/p>\n
I like the concept of \u201ccultural glasses\u201d mentioned in the TED talk. That affects a lot the interaction of people from different cultures. Also, how he said when we move to a different country we might confront, complain or conform. For me, it was interesting to look back and see what I\u2019ve done when I moved to Portugal or China. I think I had both confront and conform, sometimes I would not be able to accept certain norms of those cultures, but with time I became more open to the new environment and adapted to the society.<\/p>\n
I believe that intercultural competence is important. For example, having the right attitude while interacting with people, being open, curious and tolerant; being knowledgeable and having critical cultural awareness, all of these are necessary today while interacting with people coming from different cultures. I hope in this course I will learn more regarding these and other skills necessary to acquire global competence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Before studying in an international college my opinion regarding culture was most likely around the top of the iceberg. I thought the food, language, music, dance, art, and many other aspects defined a culture. However, I never realized the full deepness of a culture, how much there is to understand, the beliefs, values, and emotions. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1321,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1321"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":330,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions\/330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}