Campus Events

William Lehman
IDS 3300-101
Dr. Derek Stanovsky
November 4, 2008
Campus Events

On October 6th, I attended a small lecture/informational meeting in Raley Hall. The event was hosted by a Business school professor; the guest was a multi-cultural, international businessman. He has worked significantly in globalistic settings. He spoke mainly on the inter-cultural struggles that he has overcome as an African educated in China and now working mainly with Germany, Mexico, and the United States. He discussed how he had overcome language barriers and how he had to struggle to connect to workers in the manufacturing plant in Mexico. He also talked about how we should have a very open mindset when working in an international setting.
This was an Interdisciplinary event because there was a melding of Linguistic, Socio-Political, and International Business. I consider this event a Socio-Political because he spoke of trying to understand the workings of the group in an official and unofficial setting. There is also an aspect of Linguistics portion to the lecture because of how of the language barriers that must be overcome to accurately represent expectations and meaning. International Business from the aspect of how a global business should be approached and managed.
The second event I attended was, on October 10th, the High Country Global Opportunities Conference. It was hosted by the AIESIC Club on campus; the guests were several successful business men ranging from niche entrepreneurs (Freddie Davis), to government employees from the US Dept. of Commerce (Greg Sizemore). The US Commercial Service is a government office that is there to help businesses go international, because of the significant amount of revenue that can be made through international trading. The business men went over the market that is available for us to capitalize on.
The Opportunity Conference was not particularly interdisciplinary. There was a significant amount of knowledge to be gained but it was mostly economical, possibly some International Law but to no great extent beyond that. It was informative but altogether not very helpful to me furthering education in Interdisciplinarity.