Evaluating My Intercultural Competence

It is very important in this cosmopolitan world to understand the culture and background of people with whom we are interacting. Culture is something that influences a person’s decisions and traits. In this blog I will be reflecting on my intercultural knowledge and communication.

My stay in 3 different places in India and then in Singapore has made me conscious of my own culture and how it differs from other cultures. This experience has made it easy for me to work in teams that have people from diverse cultures. However, after the class on inter-cultural communication, I realised that though we were comfortable working together we did not discuss much about our own cultures. Despite recognising the existence of different cultures most of the time we assume things based on the limited knowledge that we have about that culture.

However, NUS has been crucial in increasing my knowledge about various cultures and people in Singapore through events such as “Bits&Bytes” and modules like Singapore Studies. In fact, the Singapore Studies module which I took last semester has improved my understanding of how various cultures co-exist in Singapore. These things reinforce the concept that for any society with cultural differences to coexist, all cultures must be recognised, respected and the interest of one culture should not interfere with other cultures. I am able to see this both in the Singapore and the India’s context where the government’s policies and laws are framed with this cultural diversity in mind.

I learnt in the class other day that I was not aware of some festivals that were being celebrated by different communities. I believe that this ignorance was because I had not discussed much about culture with people though we discuss other day to day things. However, this does not mean that I was never curious or open about others cultures. I have tried to find out about other cultures, but most of the times the sources were from the internet and not the people from that culture.

The class on intercultural communication has enabled me to realize that I should try to find out about the cultures of other people and should not wait for people to talk about their culture. In fact, I understand that I can learn about a person by learning his/her culture as traits of a person are determined by the culture from which they come from.