“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”
Guiding Futures: My Experience Volunteering at a University Fair
Education. We all receive education, but for what purpose? To get grades, to learn, to just hang on by a thread of academics or to be a better image of yourself in the future. To receive better education is a pathway to a better position in the future. To be models for the younger generation, as you looked up at others. But, where to start from? How to know which college provides a better education? Which university has your field of interest? It’s a vast world with thousands of colleges, but which one is suitable for you? These are a few questions teenagers like me have. To solve these questions, a university fair was held with so many schools from all over the globe. Genoa, Switzerland, UK, US, Canada and many more who represented them at this fair, discussing fee structure, courses, and offered accommodations and scholarships given to students to give them a better understanding of how the abroad colleges work. I volunteered to help my teachers and the representatives with any help they would need and got to explore many aspects of this fair myself. From my experience, LO1 AND LO2 have been developed.
LO1- Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
As I stood in between chaos and curious students running from one stall to another, I felt confused and lost, just like shown in movies (yes, when the main character stands in between the busy streets of New York looking paranoid as the people keep passing by). I usually discipline my younger siblings by ordering them with a task or a reflection session if their actions were right or wrong, but here, I had to face hundreds of younger kids. I approached the noisy kids, “Hi! Can you please talk slower?”. “Stay in line!!”. “You. Yes, you! Be more polite”. It was pure chaos. But, by the end, I did well in managing the crowd, helping the representatives with whatever resources they needed, such as grabbing them water bottles, helping them find charging plugs and extensions, holding their stuff as they set up their tables and other small miscellaneous stuff. By the end of the fair, I realised my strengths lie in: keeping discipline in huge crowds and helping others, but I had to develop a few areas for growth, such as being more approachable and learning how to confront the crowd more formally.
LO2- Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken
The biggest challenge I have faced in the university fair is keeping up with the fast-paced movements around me. To keep an eye out on students misbehaving, to keep them in discipline, to guide the representatives to their respected sitting areas in the huge hall, to make sure the representatives from the colleges have all they need such as pens or cables or extensions, to make sure the banners are in place and guiding the parents to the stall of the university they wanted to know more about. It was too much work at one time. It was hard to keep up with all the tasks at hand, and it was rigorous. After a certain point of time, finally the crowd subsided and I took a very long deep breath and I smelled fresh flowers and the natural smell of the earth (just kidding). It’s just I felt a prolonged sense of victory! My first sip of water felt as if I was drinking the sweet vector of immortality and my first bite of sandwich felt as a gourmet meal. The day went well, spent well, learned a lot, including the terrifying amount of money to study abroad but except that, the university fair is one of the best experiences of my DP journey!
Conclusion:
This is the end of chapter with the University Fair experience. In the end, it was an interesting and quite a new kind of experience. Chapter 2 in my DP life ends here and I am excitedly awaiting to share Chapter 3 in the book of my academic life as a DP student.
THE END