Global Perspectives
My global experience is taking one MLL course. The course I have completed is MLL 190, which is called The World of Language: Structural and Biological Aspects. MLL 190 explores the world and how different people use language. The course teaches about various vowel sounds and how your upbringing and where you are from will impact your speech.
This course meets the overall expectations for the Grand Challenge global experience because it helps to give a better idea to how different cultures and places around the world use language and how that affects their social dynamic. It is imperative to learn these things because to understand how to help people from different places, it is important to know where they are from and their social norms. I have taken MLL 190 in spring 2019, making this a bronze experience.
The relation of this course to my grand challenge is moderately tied (2) because while these courses are not directly correlated to engineering better medicines. The skills learned in these classes is very valuable in my chosen grand challenge. For example, in MLL 190, we learned about the human brain and how language is processed and how different diseases and deficits can affect the brain and as a result, speech. Therefore, those types of knowledge are important to know because it allows for us to create better medicines depending on various types of diseases and illnesses.
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Reflection:
Throughout this experience I have learned not only more about different languages, but I was able to appreciate how imperative learning other people's cultures and how they use language is to be able to communicate and collaborate with people from around the globe. This experience taught me that it is important to go outside of your comfort zone and learn how other people live their lives because in order to truly make an impact in their lives with your work, you first have to understand how they live and their culture. It is vital to get to know a place and its people before coming in and introducing your own ideas, it is not only respectful, but it will also help bring new ideas into the project.
Program-Wide Objective(s):
My global experience contributes to the program wide objective realistic vision because it allows a better understanding about how people are limited by language and how that can affect those who may be hard of hearing, blind, or have a deficit. While everyone has a language in some shape or form, it is a factor that is rarely considered to be at the top of a priority list when thinking about how people grow and learn. Language is so ingrained in our lives that we sometimes take it for granted. Therefore, this experience taught me that there are many forms of language and some people have constraints that make their language and how they communicate look different.
Personalized Learning Objectives
One learning objective that resonates with me is interpersonal communication. Being able to effectively communicate with other people about the issues at hand and learn more about their language and how that can influence your research in order to help them is a skill I hope to learn.
Another learning objective is situational awareness. This experience should help allow me to appropriately adapt to different situations and allow me to grow my own perspective to how while other people may be different, we have many similarities and that can help me create something that can benefit them.
Interdisciplinarity Objectives:
In order to work with diverse teams, it is important to remember that learning about languages helps to find better ways to communicate to those who may not speak the same language or have different cultural norms than you. This means that when working in team, it allows for better communication and better translation of thoughts that can allow projects to be more successful. Furthermore, in order to be a global citizen, it is so important to bring not only your own perspective to the table, but to have tools to understand other people’s perspectives as well. This experience has allowed me to become a global citizen because I learned a lot about other people’s cultures and have gained the skills needed to interact more effectively with people from around the world.
It is imperative that we become aware of other cultures and how they communicate and grow using their own version of a language and how that shapes a group of people and using that knowledge to help and understand them. Lastly, not everyone’s language is going to look alike but knowing how to appreciate the differences and adapt to other people’s cultures and language is so important to learn.