The Significance Of The Ability To Make Friends In A Multicultural Environment

APU is a multicultural environment is where there are a lot of people with different religions, beliefs, and cultural background in one community. In that space, I am confident that making friends is the key to have an excellent APU life. Therefore, the most important assessment to have is flexibility. The definition of flexibility in this context is the ability to accept another person’s opinions or actions even though it is not suitable for his / her own. In my opinion, this is the fundamental rule to follow because being stiff in a multicultural environment will not get you any friends. You need to acknowledge a bunch of new shocking occurrence like habits, dressing, and much more. Being flexible and accepting the change is really crucial in this situation. Furthermore, the second quality which is also necessary to have is a challenging spirit. Always be up for a challenge (good ones) and give it all your effort so that you won’t regret anything when you receive the result.

An example is a bit of memory from my school life. When I entered senior high school, I met a lot of new friends from different school across my hometown. The way my friends talked at that time is completely different to what I had experienced before. At first, I am not able to communicate with any of my classmates. However, after I tried to accept that change and tried time over time, I was able to socialize and go on at the same pace as my classmates and finally became friends.

To achieve success in a multi-cultural environment you will need to be more patient and tolerant to the people you are with. This is needed due to the fact that they may annoy you with their habits and customs they do on their regular daily life. In addition, we also need to take initiative to realize our own advantages and weaknesses. We should keep training our talents so that we can maintain what we do and learn much more on our weaknesses so that it will one day be our strength as well in the future. There is an idiom that sounded, “A knife that has sharp edges but has never been sharpened along time will be dull in the end. On the contrary, a dull knife that is constantly sharpened will become a sharp knife in time”. You will need all the fighting spirit you have to make friends.