The course that I took fell under ENME 408: Special Topics in Engineering. The class I took was Global Engineering, and it consisted of a collaboration between UMBC and the University of Porto. Weekly, there were class meetings where I was able to interact with University of Porto students and learn more about their culture as well as learn about their experience being engineering students in a completely different country. We met weekly as we worked with a group and the professors required us to be half United States half University of Porto students. We worked with these students in and outside of class to complete the assignments given to us although our time zones were extremely different.

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This experience meets the overall expectations for a Grand Challenge experience because the 3 credits of the course align with the hourly commitment. In addition, the experience is included in the list of preapproved options. As far as the specific requirements for an entrepreneurship experience, the final project required for us to come up with a product dedicated to the region assigned to us. My team’s countries were Kenya, Indonesia, and Guatemala. After doing enough research on the product, the market it will be in, the competition, as well as the culture of the engineering infrastructure required to create said product my team had to present this idea to the professors. My team’s idea was to create a new device to harvest coffee beans with. The entire class required me to be in an entrepreneurial mindset while being able to communicate my group’s ideas effectively and sell our product.

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This experience taught me a lot about the Portugal’s culture as well as how important it is to understand other cultures when it comes to engineering. When most engineering students start out it is very easy to focus on the engineering that happens in the United States and our problems rather than seeing the bigger picture, that engineering is needed everywhere in the world. When working in other places in the world, it is important to consider that not only will the cultures be different, but because of this the way engineers work together is also different. This class allowed me to work with Portugal’s students as well as gain experience with working with people in different time zones.

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By working with students from an entirely different culture, it was important to coordinate ourselves as far as our different time zones and assigning work to each other. This skilled sort of teamwork I had to do with them prepared me for the work world because if I have to work with anyone from a different country I feel like I will have a better understanding and be more aware of their schedule as well as the importance of keeping a constant communication with them throughout the projects. Another thing is that I had to research about other countries, and their community and cultural effects on the way engineering business may be handles in those countries. This gave me a lot of perspective on the individualism that we feel in the Unites States as engineers and how many countries work on projects considered as a community effort with their working peers.

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My entrepreneurial experience did involve some moments loosely related to my challenge, but I would not say that it is directly related to advancing personalized learning. Some of the moments that I would say I could relate it to education as a whole is the cultural aspect of the class. Because I was able to experience and learn about the effects of cultures on engineering, it was also evident that cultures would affect education as well. This means that learning cannot be the same for every country, it should be personalized to the people in each country and the cultures there.

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The main objective this experience seems to contribute the most would be the realistic vision objective. My team came up with the idea of creating a device to harvest coffee cherries with a new device, and in choosing this device we had to research all three of the places in the world assigned to us. Although the tool we wanted to add to the Kenyan, Indonesian, and Guatemalan market was fine when wanting an alternative to the way current coffee harvesting was, we had to eventually be sensitive to the constraints in the real world just as the objective states. We did this by looking at the engineering infrastructure available in each country, the state of the economy, as well as the cultural norms to ensure that the product will be used by the workers. This project allowed us to come up with a real solution to a problem and effectively apply it to the given environment.

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In this class I was able to develop strategies for recognizing opportunities and identifying the tools for quality risk assessment. For this project we had to figure out a product that was needed by the three countries assigned to us. We had to recognize that the coffee market was huge in these countries and find a way to help with the tool of our choice. Once we chose our tool, we then had to do a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis on the product which exhibits a type of quality risk assessment that is done on products to understand the type of market they will be entering.

I had the chance to exhibit my skills for communicating ideas in a concise and logical way. At the end of our project, we had to give a 10-minute-long presentation about our idea which included our economic, cultural, and market analysis of our product. We had to effectively communicate our reasonings for choosing this product as well as why these countries are the most feasible place for it while also ensuring that the content stayed below the time limit.

 

I worked effectively in teams focused on entrepreneurship-related projects. Our team consisted of students from both UMBC and the University of Porto. Despite having completely different cultural background and living in drastically different time zones, my group was able to make it work, and we came out of the project satisfied with our final product. It is safe to say that I was able to work effectively in this team to help give us our desired outcome.

 

I was able to apply entrepreneurial thinking to social issues and social problems. A social problem to think about was how robotic or machine tools are coming to replace humans in their place of work. In places like Indonesia, it was evident that coffee harvesting was a huge means to living, and thus it was important that we did not make a tool to replace the labor of coffee harvesters, but a tool that would make their job easier. We had to apply this thinking when choosing our product for this project.