How did I run a software project with other cultures during my Erasmus period?
Actually, I can say that I am a little late to publish this article. I would like to talk about the software project I made during my Erasmus period by mingling with other cultures. You can find more detailed information about the project here.
As an Erasmus exchange student, I attended the ‘India Gateway Program’ at THWS University past year. We built a gamification concept together with my colleagues at CHRIST University. This reflection will convey my experience and the process to you during this course.
Ms. John (our teacher) shared with us the ideas of the partner university and helped us choose our teammates and projects. Naturally, I matched with the group that had the closest idea to mine and teamed up with them. First, we met our Indian friends via Zoom and met them in a WhatsApp group. Generally, our communication continued over WhatsApp and we shared our responsibilities easily from there. My teammates consisted of three Indians and my friend who was an Erasmus student like me. After discussing with our teammates the concepts of our project, our project was clear: ‘Customizable Interior Design Ranking System with Recruitment Elements’ would be our topic and project.
I will not deny that we had some problems at the beginning of the project. As an Erasmus student, getting to know different cultures is quite new for me, but keeping up with different cultures was a bit strange at first. However, in a short time, we solved these issues comfortably with our Indian friends. Since each member of the team works in a different area of the project, we had to keep each other informed about our progress. During all these developments, I tried to add teachings to myself from the work of my teammates and tried to show my current performance better. As we were working on a gamification concept, the most important thing for us was to be able to integrate the mechanics and techniques into the system. As that is the key, we did a lot of research and often talked to each other and brainstormed. I believe we all felt in Casatela’s (our project name) final presentation that all that hard work paid off.
While these techniques were applied one by one on the website, we did not neglect to prepare the documents related to our project. Our Indian teammates were editing the website by coding in the 3D part of the project, while I and my friend were preparing the UI design and mechanical parts of the document. In order for the gamification concept to be implemented properly, we were determining the concepts that should be on the website in the document. Instead of meddling in each other’s business in the team, I can say that we helped each other a lot. Everyone was able to voice their opinions, and these ideas could always go further. We can now understand much better that this collaboration in the team was the main reason that brought our project to the top. Each time, we took our project one step further.
Not only with this project, but also with many works, I had the opportunity to get to know Indian culture. While studying the exam topics of my other courses or simply preparing my presentation at the IGP, I mentioned the important points. All of this has helped me better understand and get to know the people I work with. Indians were very kind and tried their best. We’ve never had a major problem with them but just one problem has put us off a bit. They were late in telling us things about timing or they were saying it at the last minute. Being a very busy person, these last-minute changes took me by surprise and put me in a difficult position. When I studied their culture and way of dealing, I realized that this was normal and natural for them. We expressed our problem and asked them to tell us about some developments earlier. They were also very understanding and we were able to solve our problem in a simple way.
In summary, our project came to a successful conclusion and although we had difficulties throughout this adventure, I had a lot of fun and learned a lot. As an Erasmus student, it was an invaluable experience for me and I don’t regret taking this course. On my way to get to know the world better, I had fun learning about cultures and I did work that would contribute to my portfolio. I think this course will help me a lot in my future career as well as help my English. I would have loved to go to India as planned at the beginning of the course but it was canceled due to the coronavirus. We chatted with our teammates not only about the project but also about each other’s lives and goals. We got to know each other as a friend and as an Erasmus student, I am quite happy about it. Again, I would like to thank our THWS dean and Ms. John, who helped me choose this course.
