Cultural Differences

Today was our last day with the INEMA students and I am so grateful to have met all of them and been able to experience 14 difference cultures and hear about 14 different countries perspectives because most people in their lifetime will never even go to that many countries yet alone meet people from there. It was obvious that some cultures meshed better with others while others seemed to clashed or either had communication errors. All of these experiences is what makes our time here so intellectually stimulating.

On our last day we had an INEMA alumni come in and speak to us/ show us activities about global learning. We discussed the world population, which continents contain what amount of the world population, which continents have the highest GDP, and more about the globe. What was very interesting was as a whole the class was unaware of the where the majority of the worlds population lived and which continent produced the highest GDP (the two typically go together). Asia is where over 60% of the world’s 7.5 billions people and also the country with the highest GDP and that is something I was taught in my basic economics class. What the INEMA students thought is that the United States produced the higher GDP and had more/a equal number of people as Asia. This I think is widely misinterpreted across the globe possibly because of media and because so many people want to come to the United States and that our country is portrayed as very wealthy with high work standards. Many people forget that the North American continent also contains Canada and and Mexico, which is something I noticed in our discussion today is that our guest speaker considered Mexico as part of South America.