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On the 13th April of 2019, an annual dinner of School of Computing was held. It was organized by Persatuan Mahasiswa Sains Komputer (PERSAKA). This annual dinner is called Malam Apresiasi Sekolah Komputeran 2019 or in shortform, MASKOM’19. On that year, the theme for this event was Cultural Medley. It was held at Dewan Kencanapuri, Pulai Spring Resort from 8:00PM until 11:00PM. The event was held very close to UTM Skudai so the students can go there easily without wasting more fuel. It was very considerate of UTM to held the event so near.
The dinner was launched by Prof. Dato’ Ir. Dr. Mohammed Rafiq which is the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering. The Chair of the School of Computing, Prof. Dr. Abdul Samad, Dr. Iqbal Tariq, Dr. Dayang Norhayati, also attended the event. Other representative like representative of School of Computing, Miss Yap Sin Yee, the president of PERSAKA 2018/19, Mr. Amirul Syahmi also involved in the opening ceremony of MASKOM’19. In the ceremony, there were about 16 senior lecturers and around 166 students of School of Computing attended the dinner to celebrate the achievements of the excellent students. There were variety of cultural attire around the world that was worn in that event. Some of the attire are Kimono, Punjabi, Baju Kurung, Cheongsam, Arabian and so on.
During the continuation of the event, we were entertained by a lot of performances. One of the performance was theatre performance by Teens and Theatre which was consisted of UTM Students.There was also a band performance which also performed by UTM Students from School of Computing. The band was call Aquastic band and they performed three songs throught the dinner interlude with the theatre performances. All of the lecturers, the deans, the students and event the committees enjoyed variety of good food and the non-resisting desserts that was provided by the resort catering team.
In the middle of the event, the award ceremony slot was held while all of the students were enjoying their meal. In this specific award event, awards are given to the students that accomplished grades and CGPA of flying colour duirng the first semester of 2018/2019 for each course nad year of study from first year students to fourth year students. Fourth year who achieved excellent academic and non-academic accomplishment throught their study of four years in School of Computing will also receive the Best Student Award. However, there were not many students received these awards. I was amazed to see the faces of the excellent students and I’m very grateful to meet them all in person.
Upon reaching the ending of the ceremony, souvenirs were given to the VIP guests and photoshoot session was held around the resort area. After that, I did approached some of the seniors that receive those award to congratulate them to show them my gratitude and to ask them some friendly study tips. I could see that most of them has very great communication skills and that is probably one of the contribution for them to deserve those awards. In my experience, communication skills is very important in life, especially during our study days as it leads to more questions asked and more knowledge gained.
I was appointed as a committee in this event. To be exact, I was included in a team of 3K (Keselamatan (safety), Kecantikan (decoration), Kebersihan (hygiene)). I applied to be a committee in this event because I was in my first year and I thought I could use my chances to socialize with my seniors and my peers of other courses. My team consisted of two seniors and two peers. I was so grateful that I was included in this team because I have learned so many things with them. During my school days, I was quite active in the decoration acitivities, so I think I could apply my creativitiness in the event. This time it was of course, a different experience because the decorations involved with a lot of money and professional-looking decorations. But the most important thing of all, I had the best team as they were all cooperating as a team work. All of my team members did sacrificed some of our weekends to make sure everything for the dinner was prepared perfectly.
Apart from that, while being in the team, I saw leadership skills and the proactiveness of each team members in my team. A few days before the dinner was held, all of us have to do works like shopping, handling the decorations and managing the money. We were divided into more sub-team so that it would be a lot easier to manage. I was managing the shopping for decorations part with my peers and one of my senior. We were both have different creativities so the items that we decided to bought are both from our creativities. My senior name is Hana and I think she managed us well as a leader. She has the potential of becoming a leader when she considerated everybody’s opinions and also could take action when the opinions contradicts. I had a great experience collaborating my ideas with them.
However, when working as a team, the number one issue that always appear is money issue. This is because even though we are peers, we don’t know each other very well. The number one question that always appear is “Is he/she honest?” or “Is he/she can be trusted?”. This is where the ethics and integrity rolls in every each of the team members. We were given a quite amount of budget for decorations, so there will be only one person who keeps the money, which was our team leader, Hana. Hana, as expected, she is full of honesty and responsibility when she given the correct amount of money to us for the decorations and keep none for herself. It was also our job to look for good qualities of products for the decorations and not the cheap and easily broken ones. I was surprised there was no issue occurred when there was money involved. All of our team members are full of integrity by buying a great amount of items and also from good qualities. This shows that every members were very responsible for their own tasks.
When I reached home after the event, I reflect on these lessons that I have gained throughout the whole entire journey of being a committee. I have realized that I needed to consider some things silmutaneously which were the responsibility as a committee and also as a person. I have noticed that the lessons that involved myself in a lot of things especially learning during the process of setting up the event/ceremony. To me, this is what we called learning through experiences and there’s a studies that says by Susan Gredly (2015), service learning is often heralded as an important way of providing potentially transformative learning opportunities for students to develop empathy and an ethic of care, contributing to student being and engagement in the world. This is true as what we have learnt are the things that we apply in the real world with other people. Learning from experience can be started from small ages like 3-4 years old because it willl be transformed into knowing and practice over the years. These lessons did not only just made me a better person in attitude-wise, but also a person with mature thinking. As a person with beliefs, I knew that all these lessons are very useful for me to not neglect to bring me good fortune in the hereafter. Especially with money involved, it will be such a big deal to some people.
As a conclusion, towards the end of the ceremony, I think most of the committees had work very hard to make the dinner successful. Everything that was done from the hardwork from day 1 to day 7 or more, was very worth the money and the time. The committees that were in a different team, especially the publicity team plays a huge role in the ceremony because their tasks are applied during the ceremony and not before. As for the skills that I have learnt in this opportunity, I will surely apply this in the workplace someday. Being creative, leadership skills and also sociable skills are very important in life and I am very grateful I got this opportunity to experience. I would not going to turn back time to change what had been done by our team members and other teams because it was all very precise and almost flawless. If there were no cooperation and toleration between the teams, the ceremony would surely be remembered as a bad or bittersweet memories to the people involved, especially the students. I hope one day, I could join again being a committee on these kind of events so I could polish my skills that I have gained in this event more. That will surely bring benefit to all people and a good example especially for my juniors.