An Outlet: Part 2

19 August, 2017.

A lot has happened in these past few days.

I'm not even sure I have documented all of them.

Yesterday, my club had its first event called, Share Your Story (#SYS). This is a platfrom for everyone to come up and share their experiences, learnings, observations, knowledge on a set theme. This time, the theme we chose was 'Travel'. We knew that people will not come up themselves and share things so we invited two travelers to share their travel stories first. We also took/collated videos from other travelers (including a proper nomadic hippie) who were not going to be able to come to our campus.

Since the past week or two, my committee had been working hard to make this possible. Brainstorming and actually setting the concept of #SYS took a lot of time (amidst a lot of miscommunication). Then actually putting down the concept on paper,  making countless number of posters, contacting various travellers, making intelligent and relevant questions for them to answer, editting those videos (including subtitles), arranging gifts and to the actual execution of the event yesterday! Boy, was it an experience.

I have never actively been part of planning, executing and actually being one of the front runners of any event in my life.  I feels good. One my goals for this was to be considered as an asset to a team and I think I have taken my steps towards it with positive results.

Moving back to yesterday.

I reached college early because I had to practice my club introduction skills. Apparently, day before yesterday, some known personality visited our college and students didn't put up a good show. They weren't able to speak at all. This left our Dean super angry and she asked all of the club mentors to get their respective club's position holders where she would question each one of us.

When Ms. Paula called me yesterday and told me about all of this, I got shit scared and started preparing and bracing myself so that my club doesn't get shunned the way it did a couple of weeks back. Have I documented that story?

So I went to college early, prepared myself along with Ms. Paula and went for my lectures.

There is this one professor in college who for some reason seems to kind of like it when I answer or contribute in the on-going discussions in class. He is pretty short-tempered and cannot deal with any kind of flamboyance and this is what I admire about him. I don't think he can ever have a favourite student. He is devoid of that emotion. Hence, it comes as a surprise to me when he seemed to encourage me to answer. I don't know how he manages to do that, but he can sense whenever I have an answer in mind. I am honestly, really humbled because I've don't usually catch any professor's attention.

Anyways, when all the club mentors and the committee members met with the Vice Dean, she told us that we all will be trained to become good speakers. Every Monday, after normal lectures, we'll have public speaking lessons. They want us to be the faces of our college. Let's see how this goes. Lord knows I'm in desperate need of public speaking lessons.

After college, we got into action. My other VP finally got the badges and I felt so happy seeing my name on it.

We set the room up and then I went down to wait for the guests. Our guests for today were someone from Germany and someone from India/China. Both of them have traveled a lot of countries and they were going to share their experiences with us today. I was their person of contact. This means, I had to be in constant contact with them and make sure they were able to get to the place perfectly.

I recieved them and took them to the place where the event was supposed to take place. It was kind of disheartening to see that only a handful of people had come to witness our first event. We knew that we weren't the most popular club, but we expected some amount of audience. I decided to let it go and concentrate on my learning experience instead.

The German guy was okayish. I mean, I expected more than 'I went here for blah, I went there for my blah'. I wanted to know more about his actual experience of living in each of the countries he had visited.

Our Entrepreneurship Sir was also present and he then took over the event for a bit. But thank goodness he did. He spoke about all of his experiences (mainly career related) and how he landed up at places. This is when things started to get more interesting, atleast for me.

After cutting him short (cause he honestly went on for a really long time), it was our second speaker's turn. She was great! She spoke about the various troubles that she went through and how all of them taught her something. I love that kind of stuff.

There was a healthy conversation that followed after the presentations and the event was over. We all networked for a while and it was good. I asked all the questions I wanted to.

We then presented them with the gifts, took a group picture and then the audience left. Ms. Paula and I spoke to the guests for a bit after which we gave them a tour and eventually escorted them back to their car.

Even though we did not have much audience, I enjoyed it. And for me the event was a success.