Cross-Cultural Psychology
For my diversity-themed experience, I took Cross-Cultural Psychology in the Summer of 2021. For this class, I created an e-portfolio of my assignments and honors project which can be accessed from the link to the right. This course was the first time that I had to consistently keep up with an ePortfolio so I immediately gained a new skill, digital literacy. In regard to the coursework, I gained insight into the diverse nature of thinking and why different cultures are the way they are. For my e-portfolio assignments, we would have to complete, a blog post, an assignment takeaway, or a top artifact that related to the chapter we covered in our corresponding module for the week. In addition to the intriguing nature of the content we were learning, the set-up of the assignments was a great way for me to apply the knowledge learned to my personal life, and reflect on my cultural differences from others around the world.
Access e-portfolio here
A specific assignment that showcases my abilities and relates to my major is the honors project I completed for the course. For this project, I had to create a project that presented an example of cultural diversity within the literature. I chose to focus on chapter 11 from the text that focused on Culture and Health. My project took on the perspective of 5 different cultures to explore the differing beliefs and remedy choices for the common cold. The information from each of the perspectives that I wrote about came from interviews that I had with friends that belong to the respective culture. Having the opportunity to complete this project helped me apply my knowledge to my personal life and also taught me an exuberant amount of ways to enhance my communication skills with others. Being able to learn about different cultures and having friends to converse with about our distinct differences made me really humble and helped a lot in my personal development. Although I have a lot of experience being in diverse environments, I appreciate the conversations that came out of this project which allowed me to gain insight into the nature of the world and progress my personal development as a leader and an individual soon to be in a health care setting.
Reflection
Through this class, I learned about different cultures and reflected on related experiences in my life which have enhanced my knowledge and perspective-taking skills and utilized my digital literacy skills to produce and organize an e-portfolio of my class assignments. In my future career, these qualities will help me tremendously as I collaborate with others in school and also as I move on to help others professionally who don’t share the same values as me. This is especially important regarding jobs revolving around health, which is what I am pursuing because there are many aspects that are vastly different between cultures and should be taken into account when interacting with patients.