REPORT OF COPE

DATE: 8TH MAY 2022 - 4TH JUNE

ORGANISER : JKM KTDI SESSION 21/22

Position: Head of external affairs unit.

Role: Taking care of all the external affairs.

• Emailing invitations to VIP,students, crew members and collaborators.
• Follow-up with RSVP.
• Communicate with VIPand collaborators.

Connecting People with Nature (COPE) is a great initiative and also a top bidder program of JKM KTDI. This program mainly focuses on educating and implementing Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) or Global Goals. We collaborated with WWF Malaysia and MNS Malaysia in this program. This program helped to increase awareness on SDG among the students and also to teach them to respect and love nature. We also raised funds for MNS Malaysia through this program.

This program was held from 8th May 2022 to 4th June 2022. Numerous programs were held during COPE and some of them were bird race competition, talks from WWF and MNS, tree planting and a lot more activities which were interesting and beneficial to the environment. We also sold merchandise to collect funds for MNS Malaysia. COPE was a hybrid event where some programs were conducted online and some face to face. My role in this program was head of the external affairs unit. This program gave me the opportunity to improve my communication and thinking skills. I'm very grateful that I was given the chance to be in such an inspiring program.

This was the first time I worked in the external affairs unit and being in this unit taught me piles of new things and I had to face a few challenges. One of the challenges was communicating with huge organisations like Malaysian Nature Society (MNS) and World Wide Fund for Nature. I consider this as a challenge because we have to make sure we communicate in a polite way because miscommunication with renown organisations like WWF and MNS can put the reputation of our university at stake. Fortunately, I was guided by the advisors of this program on how to communicate with organisations and clubs outside of UTM.

   In addition, my communication skills have improved drastically and I have learned how to officially contact organisations and clubs. Not only that, members in my unit have to work virtually as we were not in UTM for this program. So I always have to make sure that the information I give my unit members is clear and consistent. 

 Additionally, my thinking skill and problem solving skill shined during this program where one of the speakers was not able to attend the rehearsal one day before the talk and not having rehearsal without the actual speaker can cause loads of issues. This is where I come up with a solution to carry on the rehearsal without the speaker first and then invite the speaker to join us 15 minutes earlier one the day of the talk so that we can brief her on the flow of the program. I understood that we should always have alternatives as it is very common to face problems when organising an event.