For my global perspectives experience, I enrolled in Political Science 270 at UMBC. The main purpose of this class is to present students with the complicated contemporary political world and how it can affect cultural, economic, and environmental decisions in the world today. Key issues were discussed every week. For example, one week the class discussed the effect the cold war, space race, and nuclear arms race had on the economic policies of the United States and Russia. Another week, the group discussed how a nation’s culture can impact the workplace structure exhibited. For example, the United States, Russia, and Japan all have very different managing styles and workplace etiquette. The best part of this experience was that it talked about all of these issues on a global level and was not restricted specifically to the United States. Assigned readings were distributed each week to read and then write subsequent small reports on. These readings were case studies from around the world written from very different points of view. A total of five reports/discussions were due each week, and quizzes occurred at the end of each unit.

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Fortunately, this class was entirely online, so it provided me with the flexibility I needed during my final semester between my two jobs and five other classes. And it turned out to work very well for me. I was able to turn in the reports when I had free time so I wasn’t committed to deadlines. It was a 3 credit class, so I completed on average the 10 hours/week worth of work between the readings, writings, and final reports at the end of the semester. For a 15 week semester, this totaled to be 150 hours at the end. I was actually very happy with this class because it brought me outside the realm of engineering courses. I had been debating on taking global engineering but, in reality, I would have been working with other engineers on a project, similar to what I have been doing all along. The only difference would have been that most of the group work would be virtual, similar to what is happening now during COVID-19. I thought this class would be a good experience to see how political scientists and economists think about problems on a global scale, rather than just seeing another engineering problem. For example, in regards to the provide clean drinking water grand challenge, which actually showed up in this class, had I seen this problem in the global engineering class I basically would have been working on a project to figure out “How” clean water would be accessed and distributed. The Poli 270 class, on the other hand, talked only about the aftereffects of what could potentially happen, both economically and culturally. The article only talked about groups in Africa but the takeaways were still good to note upon and could be expanded to a global level. I think it is important to recognize that no matter what every professional position will have a global aspect to it. And it is important to learn not only how to deal with increased cultural globalization, but how my actions will contribute to it.