Today I spoke at GEC SKP on Opportunity Project and it was a phenomenal event. The students, faculty and the principal were very warm 🙂
Thank you for having me!
And that is some nice feedback 🙂 Means much!
Sijo also went live and the audience at GEC SKP watched him live.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BaIzp2vg6Pt/?taken-by=aryacmurali
Some of my observations:
- There were connectivity issues — Lost connection twice in between. The issue was that College wifi doesn’t support FB. So the live was running on Jio.
- Information wasn’t getting conveyed the way it needs to be. Even when SKG spoke about Felix and his selection to VP scholarship, I don’t think the students really understood.
- Everyone wass so drawn into just seeing the live and there are about 150–200 kids. Most of them are distracted.
- Background noise was also affecting it. There was drilling happening somewhere near and people were finding it hard to focus.
Having said that, it sure was a fun experiment!
Post lunch, we also had a 2 hour hackathon to help the girls get started with their Adobe Scholarship Application.
This is how we went about it:
- The session was organised in a lab and was attended by about 78 girls.
- Created a simple google form — bit.ly/adobeskp to collect names and email ids of all the girls. I sent across resources for the Adobe scholarship then and there to the girls over email and ensured that all of them received it. Few emails bounced and we tried to correct those email ids.
- Since most of the computers had internet connectivity, we together opened the resources, went through them and clarified their doubts.
- We first went through the scholarship application form.
- We then created a google doc to start writing the SOP. Discussions happened on writing a good SOP based on Adobe’s guidelines.
- Also demonstrated Google templates to create a resume and shared best practices.
- We discussed how to go about getting a recommendation letter and what they must keep in mind.
Few challenges IÂ faced:
- Few computers did not have internet access. We wasted a lot of time there.
- Some of the girls were not quite familiar/comfortable with email.
- Most of them did not know about Google Drive/Google Docs.
However, we managed to wrap up the session in under 2 hours and all the girls have agreed to submit their applications 🙂
My Learning
Our students are super interested in these opportunities and want to figure these out. A lot of them approached me with questions and I understood that they never really knew whom to reach out to.
The feedback from teachers was that the students were interested but were not taking much effort. While the feedback from the students was that they are interested but their teachers are not supportive enough.
As far as I could understand, the teachers and the principal have course commitments as per the KTU syllabus and university. This is why they do not encourage the students to pursue extra curricular activities during class hours.
I had a very productive discussion with the Principal @ GEC SKP, Dr Reghu Raj and he was also super enthusiastic about doing all that’s possible for his students and helping them do better.
Everyone wants to see good work happening. All the problems in between is because of improper communication.
If our students got to understand and communicate with their teachers, things might work out 🙂