Events That Drastically Affected My Life

Being editor of my school magazine. This was a phase that made me feel happy, satisfied with my life, like I was actually doing something worthwhile, something I really wanted to do. More on this here.

Working on the organising committee for the technical festival during my post graduation. Where we did our MCA, they never used to host a technical festival (or any event of a similar nature, for that matter). One of classmates decided that they should. He started out by talking four of us into backing him up and helping him organize the whole thing. When we started out, we had no idea if we would be able to pull it off. If any other colleges and Universities would actually show an interest in sending a team over. We didn't even know where the money would come from. Never mind that, we didn't even know if we would get at least the bare minimum amount of support from the faculty and the administration so that we could officially go out and look for sponsorships. It took a lot of persistence, perseverance, a strong spirit, a number of disagreements, which, at times, got extremely bitter and ended with tears. But, at the end of it all, we made it through. We were able to host a significantly large scale event and host participants from all over the country. It made me believe, for the first time in my life, that if one person wanted to change the world, he could. It taught me a lot about time management, people management, handling all sorts of unpleasant situations and people, dealing with Human Resource managers from all kinds of firms, and the sheer joy of putting all your energy into something that you really want to do and making it happen.

Working on the placement committee during my post graduation. The stuff I learnt from this fell pretty much in the same broad categories as what I've enumerated above, but this also taught me about putting the larger group's interests before your personal interests, and putting long term goals before short term ones, applicable here in the context of long term relationships between various organisations and the University. It helped evolve this shy girl, who would think thrice before calling up her classmates, and then often end up not calling, into an independent girl who called dozens of people in dozens of organisations every single day.