It’s already day four of our trip to Prague and it has been a great day once again. We started today by visiting the Central Bohemian Innovation Center. This organization primarily focuses on helping startups by providing funding and resources in areas they are lacking to hopefully speed up the growth and future success of the company. This company is similar to what we have back at school, the Pittsburgh Innovation District. Organizations like these are very important to young businesses and can significantly help advance many industries.
Another part of our day was spent at Charles University where we all attempted to learn some Czech. Language classes have never been my strongest subject in school so I’m usually intimidated with the idea of trying to learn parts of a new language. Today in the class, I ended up having a lot of fun trying my best to learn. The Czech language is very complicated and I have barely scratched the surface of it, but this class provided me with more confidence when trying to interact with the locals here. Although most people in the Czech Republic speak English there can still be a noticeable language barrier. The class we had today and our visit to the Central bohemian Innovation Center showed me more of how complicated it is to work across multiple languages especially when in an engineering context. So many small but incredibly vital details could be missed due to differing languages, and those missed details could cause very negative results. Just like any engineering problem we work on though, we do our best to work within our means and find creative and efficient solutions that drive us in the direction of the best result.
Swanson School of Engineering 