Camryn Hicks, a senior business major at Penn State Berks from Harleysville, Pa., was a member of one of only ten global teams to win the X-Culture Program competition. The X-Culture competition is a large-scale international experiential learning project in which students work together to solve real-world business challenges. Each team is comprised of six or seven students from different countries who participate as part of their course curriculum. This year, a total of 6,288 students from 171 universities in 47 countries on six continents participated in the challenge.
Dr. Malika Richards, professor of management at Penn State Berks, incorporated the X-Culture competition into her international management course. All the students in the course were part of a different international team and Hicks was the only student to be part of one of the winning teams.
Hicks explains, “Each team chose their own client company (from the list of interested client companies provided by X-Culture) to prepare a market entry consulting report for. My team created a business report for the company G2Capacitación. This is a company based in Mexico that specializes in psychology and psychological counseling. Our main goals were to provide recommendations for G2Capacitación to successfully expand their services globally and expand Thanatology (the study of coping with loss) knowledge to the larger global market.”
In addition to a certificate and the opportunity to present their consulting report to the client company directly, Hicks comments that she the experience was quite valuable. “I gained knowledge about other cultures and I learned how to overcome challenges when working in a culturally diverse setting. The hardest part about working in such a diverse group is learning how to delegate work properly. Since we all lived in different time zones, it was hard to find the best time to schedule meetings and work sessions.” Hicks adds that her teammates were from Ukraine, Turkey and Ghana.
“The experience also taught me how to produce a successful business proposal since this was my first time participating in a major project like this,” Hicks states.
