Working Across Borders Testimony

We are very proud of our students from Binusian 2022, Aurelia Rachel Santoso and Daisy Deria Florencia, who participated in Working Across Borders project and won two awards! Below is their testimony on participating in the project.

This semester, we had an opportunity to participate in the Working Across Borders (WAB) project, and here are some of our experience and thoughts about it. The WAB program was a one and a half month long project that was held in an international manner. We had the pleasure of meeting new people from ten different universities from around the world, and got the chance to team up with some of them to create an amazing and interactive project. For the project itself, our task was to ultimately create a video about our client, Seventh Generation. Each group was assigned a specific country to focus on, and we were assigned Thailand. In the video, we had to propose a sustainable business idea for Seventh Generation. To do so, we had to analyze our assigned country, analyze Seventh Generation, as well as looking for areas of improvements. Our team, which we named “Bersatu”, consisted of us, two others from Belgium, and another from Canada. It was such a pleasure to work with them, since they were very cooperative, communicative, and everyone were equally as enthusiastic about the project. We even ended the project happily by winning two awards, which are for the best video award, and the highest scoring award.

From this experience, we definitely learned how to interact with people from different parts of the world, how to work on big projects through online means, and how important good communication was. Not only that, we got to expand our network, meet cool people, and made new friends along the way!

Due to the unfortunate global pandemic however, we had to do everything online. Since we were all spread around the world, the time-zone differences were huge. For example, in our team, the time-zone difference between Jakarta and Belgium was 6 hours, and if u think that is bad, the time-zone difference between Jakarta and Toronto, Canada was 12 hours. This caused major difficulties for us to set appropriate times for everyone in the team to do our weekly meetings. Still though, to make it work, we normally had our meetings at 10 or 11 pm at night, here in Jakarta.

For future WAB participants, we would like to remind you that it’s not as scary as it may seem at first. It’s a wonderful and fun experience actually. Just be sure to focus on your tasks, be respectful of one another, and try as best as you can to create an effective working environment. And most importantly, just have fun and enjoy the process! Also, note that your coach is there to help! PS, check your emails and check Toledo for project updates, be sure to not miss anything!