Social Networking Interview Sample Assignment

For this interview I chose my classmate Mie who is originally from Japan. It is obvious that we meat in the class for the first time. To be very honest, I was not feeling comfortable to communicate with him for the first time. The reasons being both of us were not fluent in English. I was afraid I would mess up our first interaction. Speaking about my perceptual bias, my perception about Japanese people was that they only love to work hard and are not so keen to meet new people or even talk a lot to the people they already know. I think that electronic and print media that I usually interact with always talks about Japanese industrial advancements but not about its culture. This could have created the perceptual bias that I had. But with time and more interaction with Mie, I realized that he is a fun loving person who loves to travel around and meet new people.

For this communication project, we meet twice, once in the library and once at the gym in Washburn where Mie works out. We discussed differ topics. Mie loves to take care of his health. This is why he has joined the gym to keep his body fit. He talked about his recent travels. He went to New York and Chicago in the last winter break. He visited a lot of places of his interest in these place. He said that he is especially interested in knowing about world history. According to him, museums are a great place to know about world’s history. Therefore, he visited many museums in his recent visits during the winter break. Mie did not make any plan to travel during the spring break. He wanted to but he had to prioritize some other personal issues over making a travel plan. But he is keen to make a complete travel plan to travel around USA during the summer break. He is expecting to get a lot of fun out of it.

Mie said that he loves to learn other languages. The main goal of him coming to USA to study is to learn English. He expects to get a Bachelor Degree for USA and at the same time be fluent in English. He said that English is undoubtedly the global language and each person should explore opportunities to learn English.

I learned a great lesson from this project. The first lesson is that we should not live in a world where we have fixed perceptions about people from other cultural backgrounds. We should be able to initiate productive communication processes to explore other people and their cultures. My second lesson is that I am also going to make a travel plan for this summer just like Mie. I have suddenly realized that I need to travel around USA and explore it as this could be my once in a life time opportunity. My communication with Mie has made realized that I should explore other culture and focus on similarities between people than always looking for differences. I think that this interview would help in connecting more efficiently to other people than I did in the past.