Managing Event

It was back to 2011, when i was in the third year of undergraduate degree. At that time, i was appointed as event coordinator, managing national Buddhist Youth Gathering and Seminar from 22 province in Indonesia. The seminar was held for 5 days, more than 200 participants and i responsible for 4 major activity; Opening Ceremony, General Seminar, National Competition with 8 diffferent games, and Closing Ceremony.

Overcrowded

Remembering all of that moment, i realized that i must be crazy if i not saying ridiculous. It was huge event, with limited budget, experience and human resouces. I was only university student at that time ! Next section is for your imagination how huge that event was.

First, opening ceremony. I need to think how to create good, appealing, impressive, memorable opening ceremony. Because it was a national event, we need to integrate culture value together. We need to prepare all the invitation to government official, searching for the master of ceremony, thinking about what kind of entertainment will be, the music choice to make it appealing, set up arrangement for traditional music from each music ! The same thing need to be prepared with the closing ceremony. Memorable, interesting, and appealing experience is the must for success in the event

Second, for the main event. The seminar itself was quite easy as i just need to prepare schedule for speaker to fill the slot. The hardest part was preparing the competition. There was 8 different type of competition, ranging from singing, academic, speech, and children story telling. Creating rule and SOP for every competition, preparing winning criteria, facing complaint from participant, preparing necessary equipments for different competition and determining qualified jury.

 

Nightmare Meeting ,When nothing is prepared a night before event started !

 

Admittedly, i was mess up everything. I event can’t imagine when the room hasn’t been set up for competition, sound system for singing competition had not been setup the day before, the jury haven’t been contacted until the last minute, couple hour before competition start, and the worst, there was nothing prepared for closing ceremony. Recalling that moment, it was really really nightmare !!!

I am lucky, my senior take over everything. He certainly older and have more experience than me. Suddenly i feel a complete loser, but quite relieve that he could tackle everything well. The event can be called success, but at least i the participants were not really dissapointed for our service.

What I Learned

Delegation, is very crucial. Other than lack of human resources, my biggest failure was i did not delegate enough. After i realized i can’t find anyone, i need to immediatelly make discussion and asking other team to solve the problem. If i could recognize the sense of urgency during preparation, maybe the problem can be avoided, or at least minimized. Well, like a folk say, experience is the best teacher. I learned a lot from there, it was a nightmare but really a though and precious experience for life.

 

 

 

 

 

Test is Not Really Test

Testing tells us little or nothing about the why of right or
wrong answers. In a given instance, does a mistake suggest an
important concept missed or only a moment’s carelessness? If
a student fails to finish an exam, did she give up in frustration
or simply run out of time? Given the time she needed, how
well might she have done? On the other hand, what does a correct
answer tell us about a student’s quality of reasoning? Was
the correct answer the result of deep understanding, a brilliant
intuition, rote memorization, or a lucky guess? Usually it’s
impossible to tell.

 

That statement i copied from Salman Kahn Book, a founder of Khan Academy. This part is the most interesting and shocked part me because i had similar experince regarding to this. In my year 11, I usually have around 8 subject in one year for each subject and I only pass the physics subjects twice !

The moment when it comes to physics test was really annoying. Most of my mistakes is not because i am not understanding the concept, but because misscalculation. mostly i forgot to change cm to m, or wrongly divide 10 by 0.1. Other case, i don’t really know which formula to use and when the teacher told me the answer i would say in my mind “i know i must use this formula! ”

It makes me sick every time i need to face physics test. In my unconsciusness realm, i already thought that i will failed, event though i understand. I always questioning why this happened and i always makes silly mistakes.

I am lucky enough that i ended up at tutoring jobs at science after graduation, including physics. At first, i didn’t really thing i can make it. But, at the end i start to getting used to it and confidently tutoring my kids throughout their exams, the one that i can’t pass during high school. I realized that i can do that and the mistakes that i made is natural due to human process of learning something. It should be repetition to make our brain get used to on it.

 

So, whats the solution ? Given the current school system, yes you are allowed to take second test if your failed first one on the same subject. But, it only give you PASS mark, even you get perfect score at second test. I feel that teacher in class should encourage more class discussion when solving a problem, focusing on “How” to solve it and “Why” this problem is being asked. Teacher assigned a score during the discussion part.

 

This solution might not be visible to be implemented because the education system already fixed that way for long time and it quite resistant to change. Still, there are a huge opportunities to fix our education system

 

 

Gan Xie 感谢

Yes, I used google translate to write those pinyin. Today, I just received shocked news,  my senior in temple which i was volunteer was dead. It was quite surprising because i was meet him before i left to sydney. Yeah,  death of someone always bring shock, surprise, sadness, and regret.

I have attended countless of death ceremony, but only several people that have direct close relationship for me. When my sister dead, i was to young to remember how it feel. Same thing happened to my grandparents. I don’t really have those “deep sadness” because i rarely have interaction with them.  But this time, although we don’t have really close relationship, i was little bit surprised when found the dead news.

 

It bring me back to think about life in the real world. Yes, I feel very gratefull now because i didn’t have any serious illness, either my families. It is a cliche statement, but ultimately true. When you are rich, you tend to have multiple disease and your money will be drain out for medical treatment. ALthough, there are a lot of people out there who blessed with healthy body and incredible wealthy. But, the universal law still exist, always look someone behind you to make sure you have more gratitute in the life.

 

Happy New Year

I missed it !

Initally, I planned to wrote the blog post at the end of year, like i did  last year.

Recalled what i did  this year, I jump to conclusion that 2016 is not that good, but also not too bad. I jumped into too much excitement about the scholarship i got last year.

Perhaps, the most valuable thing i learnt this year was finding a job is never easy. In fact, its though. While some of my friends seems never have the problem with the job seeking process, i start to learn about rejection and job ignorance  was the common thing.

 

I recalled that every year i had sandwich experience about good and bad thing. In 2012, i got great experience because that was my first time overseas. In 2013, i ended the year with desperate feeling to find a job. In 2014, also not that good because i didn’t really feel satisfied about my job and i still stuck between the options to apply scholarship or not. The 2015 was the luckiest time for me. I got scholarship, volunteered in inspiration class, and got certification in SQL exam.

Indeed, i close the year with my first casual job. Not too bad either. Next time, i will need to study harder. My resolution is simple, make myself useful with other, get a good job, and contribute to community