My deal April
- Aoyumi Jung
- May 2, 2020
- 6 min read
9:15 am. 02.05.2020
Hey! I amma write a wordy tale of my dear April.
Brief background:
This is a slow month enjoying books and movies. It’s not my priority of course but the entertainment is part and parcel. Thai language is almost out of my mind this month as I was in the mood to pick up English from Harry Potter. It is also about my lost track from the daily connection with Thai though I am staying in Thailand. If I were with my host family, it would be much different.
Highlights of April:
Restructured Youth Nurture Club’s Human Resource and conducted a training on Public Relations
To be relieved, this month is the smoothest stage for Advisor Board as we don’t need to jump in that much. As the Executive Board was officially formed, the club has a visioner to operate independently. Initially, a core team is the executive team itself but there is no decision-makers. For highschool students, the process of nominating leaders should not be as rush as in university clubs. We allow the youths to take time for preparation and get a clarity of mind. Finally, they stepped up and I heard their voice. They are becoming active to seek feedback, report work and assign tasks for members. They are more confident in their ability. I am happy to observe the steady improvement of the community.
Read Harry Potter- the Half-Blood Prince
I shared on my previous blog 3 main lessons I learnt comprising friendship, the beauty of language to portray human mind and nature, and the connection between books & movies. They are all stunning through the lens of JK Rowling. I watched a conversation between her and Daniel Radcliffe yesterday. What is impressive is the intimacy she has with all of the characters over 20 years being with them. How she talks about them is more like talking about real people, not just some imaginative ones. Plus, the overall plot was pictured in the first place in terms of its ending and the character interaction. I thought the development of the content is dependent upon a natural flow as it goes, which is totally wrong. It is not like my journal, but the novel, on the opposite, is well structured. But there are still some exceptions along the line, she might suddenly yearn to have some changes depending on the life events around her.
Wrote 3 short papers with the topic of social networks and social innovation.
The approach of writing is different among them. The first one was to convey how social networks influence the operation of a school, regarding social, environmental, political and economic factors. This paper gave me the most joy out of all thanks to a lovely team and the topic itself – education operation. We had a fun adventure to imagine how the school works as looking at its colorful map. Just by listening to the story told by my friend who owns that school and the map, we tried to link the puzzles into a big picture of the schooling system in Koh Samui Island.
Writing up was not hard cause I was able to use simple language to describe the buildings and relevant activities. We ended up getting a satisfying score out of my expectation. The second paper is about a comparative analysis that I had never written before in English. I watched Youtube and read on some websites on how to structure the ideas, then asked for feedback from my friends to revise it. It was fun too! The last one was done with little amusement for my not taking it seriously. Importantly, the collaboration with this team was not effective and joyful.
Finished Knowledge Management interview analysis and proceed to presentation
This project is run by a small team of 2 young and dump kids including me. It was a great transition in the workstudy pathway since I started to work with my new mate and new supervisor. They are both serious and dedicated to the outcomes of the work so I find myself accountable. The project allows me to stay connected with most of everyone at the faculty, if I could speak Thai then I could handle more stuff. We have been sorting out the data by categorizing the expressions, concepts, coding them and interpreting the meanings. I was sick of it for 1 week because of its messy words and our intellectual constraints. We have been through a spectrum of emotions from happiness, joy to confusion, doubt and satisfaction. The project findings will be presented to the faculty at the end of May. The details are to be shared once it’s accomplished! Other than that, I can’t say how much I am grateful for my supervisor for his incredible care, details, modesty and wisdom. He takes our level of understanding, our silence, our personal life into consideration as a dad, not only a professor. That’s why he has embraced this KM idea to create a community of practice for so long. That’s why he is the only person to be such passionate about this human connection and valuing individual development within a community.
Searched for literature regarding urbanism
My job is to search for literature and news then do some summaries or reviews in the space of urban planning. April was occupied with some convicted communities in Bangkok, historical relics in Ho Chi Minh city and the relation between cartography and urban tourism. I am seriously stressed out with this job among all of my commitments.
This space is 100% new to my knowledge so I can’t search for things without understanding what they are. I had to spend hours reading new terms and digest the academic language as well which are complex. It’s me who push myself all the time. The thing is I constantly feel pressure from my manager’s side though there is nothing in fact. I am afraid I am incapable of being a helpful hand as opposed to his level of expertise. This is such a stupid comparison. But I can’t get away with a relieving thought. But it’s ok. I am persistent, determined and hardworking. I will be foolish and honest. I will be humble till the end.
Learned how to build an evaluation plan from School of Gumption
SoG will launch an online course on “Future Creation”. I am helping with building an evaluation plan regarding the impacts out of the project. There are 2 main sides to assess including user experience and team operation. In my other community projects, we understand the process of impact evaluation but hardly put them down in a written structure. We usually do that in proposals and reports to ask for sponsorship and report the results to our sponsors. Accordingly, we assign members tasks, up to our availability but not clarify detailed responsibility since the beginning. I learnt a cool framework from my mentor and my teammate at SoG to draw out a strategic evaluation plan, particularly for an educational program. It has such points as input, outcome, level of impacts, key performance indicator, methods of evaluation, frequency and responsibilities. We haven’t conducted the projects yet, so I will pick up more takeaways along the way.
Published 4 blogs
2 of 5 blogs are my contemplation on 2 novels (Harry Potter by JK Rowling and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak). One is an interesting imagery analysis on a masterpiece of art by Van Gogh (The Wheat Field). The rest is rummaging on the dots of my associative networks.
Discovered a philosophical theory that fits the way I am – Stoicism
Stoicism is an ideology that we always think of the worst situations besides positive thoughts so that we always take things easily come what may. We understand the nature of life with the occurrences of lives and deaths, of ups and downs and of joys and sadnesses. Thus we welcome everything to arise at anytime with open-minded soul. We know we might die right tomorrow so just do our best when we are living. We have a sense of empathy for others in a way that we don’t assume bad things happening toa ourselves as bad luck. It happens to anyone and we are not the only unfortune beings. We are different in our path of life but we are all humans that have feelings and motivations. This is a perfect definition of who I am. I jumped out for joy when discovering this theory through School of Life and dived into other sources of information. As for the past 6 years, I have had 3 slogans on my Facebook representing my principles which are “Life is a journey, not a destination”; “Everything happens for a reason”; and “Less expectation, more fulfillments”.
Stay mentally healthy
By sleeping well, cleaning room, cooking, and catch up with friends and family on a personal level. I also messed around with singing, sewing and drawing. 😉
p/s: Comparing to the same period last year, I hardly had a moment to write journals for too much things going on in Ho Chi Minh city. I would make up for everything this time. If there were no such situation, I would probably be traveling to somewhere at this moment. For now, I will use my brain to move my body in illusion…
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