Research and innovation project
June – July 2016
“Hi everyone! I’m Matteo and I am a management engineer at Politecnico di Milano.
I’ve just come back from Kolkata (India) where I went to look for the information needed to draw the annual report for IIMC – Indian Institute for Mother and Child.
Thanks to the skills I had acquired during my studies it was easy to recognize the organisational structure and the division into business units. In order to collect the necessary data, it was fundamental to develop a different way to establish relationships because of the differences between our culture and the local one. This enabled me to widen my knowledge and my ability to adapt to new situations. For example, In India people usually store their data in paper sheets and just few of them have been digitalized. Besides, they prefer to postpone the work to the day after, that is why I had to “chase” them in order to obtain what I needed as soon as possible.
All this seems absurd at the beginning but when you come to know their culture you start to understand that all that is not a real problem and that you can solve it easily.
Since I had to work with differ units, I was able to understand all the mechanisms and all the projects they are working on so that I almost felt like part of it. They also asked me to contribute with some ideas.
In conclusion, I think that this experience has been very important for me both from the educational and the human point of view. That is something that I highly recommend to anyone! You will learn how to live your day and put a smile on your face no matter what difficulties you have to face (as Indians do) and in the end you will come back from India with the regret of not having learnt enough and with the wish to come back again!”
Matteo
