Living, Studying, and Working in a Multicultural Environment: Issues to be taken into Consideration.

Abstract

Cross-border movement of human being has never been so intense as it is now. Nowadays, it is quite common that people born in one country, study to another country and still work to a third country. In addition, people move and settle from one country to another country due to higher standard of living, family reason, business activity and political asylum. Based on time duration, human movement from one country to another could be termed as short-, medium-, and long term. Movement for travelling, task-based business activity, exchange study program, visiting relatives, and work-practice could be entitled as short-term movement of people from one country to another. For degree study purpose and fixed-term job could be considered as medium-term movement. Finally, moving to another country, for instance, living for permanently or study and stay could be considered as long-term movement. The main concern of this text is to suggest how to make living, studying, and working in a multicultural environment ease and smooth. Multicultural environment means an environment where more than two cultural communities live and work side by side. This paper is written particularly for the student and working community people but not excluding anyone living in a multicultural environment. Human being differs in many ways including cultural differences. Culture is a learning property where surrounding environment plays a vital role. The cultural learning process starts from early childhood and continues rest of the life. However, human brain plasticity matures at the age of about ten years old, but it never stops - human brain plasticity is a continuous process. Therefore, we learn new things all the time though age has an impact to the learning process. At the early age, we learn new things quite quickly but as we grow up learning new things may slow down. The objective of this writing is to focus on ways and means how to get adapted to a multicultural learning, working, and living environment. Though the primary discussion viewpoint will be general but Finnish perspective will be referred whenever it needs. The paper will be based on theoretical as well the personal experience of the author gained from living, studying, and working in a multicultural environment.