UKQE Reflection Report 2
Extracurricular activities 2: Sukan Sekolah Komputeran (SUSKOM)
Sukan Sekolah Komputeran (SUSKOM) is an annual event held and conducted by Persatuan Mahasiswa Sains Komputer (PERSAKA) UTM. There are abundant of activities and games held in the event. The objective of this event is to encourage students of school of computing to get involved in sports and promotes healthy lifestyle after a long time of facing electronic devices especially when all of students from the school need to code every day. This event will provide the opportunity for them to get a break from all of aforementioned activities with sports activity instead. This event is held by the high committee members of School of Computing. It is held on every 1st semester of the year. Thus, this event will usually happened in the middle of March. Abundant of activities were scheduled throughout the whole week of event. We had outdoor sports such as badminton, soccer, netball and tug of war. Besides, we also conducted indoor game, which was mainly E-Sports. The organizer knows really well about students’ interest on E-sports, especially the male students. So, they include various online games like Mobile Legend, PUBG, and FIFA for them to participate. The event went for a duration of one week. Each game was conducted only on afternoon as all the students need to attend their class first in the morning. Majority of the sports held required them to play as a team.
In order to make this program a success, the organizer themselves chose few of the students from the School Of Computing to be part of the crew. They conducted an interview 3 months prior the event date. The students whom interested to be part of the crew can register themselves and they had to wait to be called for the interview. Few departments were offered. I personally chose to be in the Food, Sponsorship and Games departments. After a week of waiting to be called, I finally got to be interviewed and eventually was given the opportunity to be in the sponsorship department. In this department, we worked in a team of 4. One of them is classmates, thus it was quite easy for me to communicate well with her. One of them also my mutual as we were from the same hometown and the last team member was a junior under the same program which is Data Engineering.
As I was chosen to be a committee member of this event under the sponsorship department, it was actually one of the toughest department as we have to go pursue companies and convince them to sponsor our small event. My team and I emailed more than 100 companies 3 months before the event started. We managed to found 4 companies who are willingly to sponsor and of course under certain condition. One of the companies that we manage to convince is 2 Hotel companies located in Johor Bahru. We indeed faced many challenges throughout the task. We had few companies canceled on the sponsorship due to some reasons. It was my first time being a committee of this department. However, my team and I handle this quiet well despite came with no experience. We eventually managed to found 4 companies who are willingly to sponsor and of course under certain condition. Two of them were from Hotel companies located in Johor Bahru. The major problem we had is time management. Few companies had canceled on us on a reason that they need to be informed regarding the sponsorship at least two months prior the event. Me and my team made a mistake on time managing where we spent a whole month to filter over 1000 companies to be contacted. Thus it halt the process of applying and emailing to the companies. So after filtering the companies, we proceed on contacting them by call and email. However, by the time we did that, it was already only a month and a half towards the event. Because of that, a lot of companies rejected our application for sponsorship. Fortunately, the 2 hotel companies were willing to sponsor us with few regulations and we were gladly accept the offer.
The sponsorship department task actually finishes as soon as the regulation has been made. So, after accomplishing our task, me and my team reflected on what to be improved the next time we involve with industries and companies. The event director said that we should plan ahead on the timing. However he was satisfied with our accomplishment on getting the sponsors despite being one of the hardest tasks. They had almost no sponsorship on prior years when they held this event. We realized that we were a bit off in terms of time management. As that being said, I made some reviewing in order to improve myself in managing plans if it involves time consuming. I need to have time management skills embedded in me because managing my time well can help me improves the quality in everything I do in my life. Organizing all the tasks will help me to complete my works on time, and give me space to be creative and proactive in my tasks. Having decent time-management skills can ultimately lead me to accomplish key goals and advancing in my position. Alexander R.Margulis (2009) emphasizes that the key steps for successful time management are by setting realistic goals, get organized, delegate, relax and recharge, and stop feeling guilty. The author also insisted that there are two major time management stumbling blocks, which are procrastination and perfectionism. As a student, this resonates with me well. Procrastination is student’s number one enemy. When I decided to put off tasks that I feel meticulous to be done, it often increase my anxiety level, resulting on further delaying my work on the task. Whereas, when If insist on making a task as perfect as it can be, I inadvertently minimize the chance that i will actually complete the task. In fact, perfect is the enemy of good. Time management skills also will affect my role as a student. According to Richelle V.Adam (2019, vol 9, issue 1), effective time management is corresponding to a greater academic performance and lower levels of anxiety in students and he found that many students find it hard to find a balance between their studies and day-to-day lives. I do agree with the author’s statement. Being a student myself, I find it really hard to separate my time into study and leisure. Most of them time, I will spent more on leisure than study because studying is stressing me out. I got stressed because I realized that I indeed procrastinate all my study tasks. The author of Insight Learnlight, Sarah Shepherd (2018) suggested one of the way to to determine how you spend your time and to adjust what you’re spending it on is to keep track of it. She added that if one task is expected to take approximately three hours, it is essential to set aside three hours of the day to do that particular task, and at the end of the three hours, you just have to move on to something else, or you can also take a break. The author mentioned about how social media can be addictive and distracting to majority of the people. So she included social media as one of the thing you should avoid when you are completing your task. The social media is either give you the benefits or be your enemy. I can ensure that this kind of platform brings more harm to the young generations if they used it with no ethics.
All in all, the feedback we got from those who joined the event was really positive and they seem to really enjoy it. Even though, in the background, the committee had to go through a lot of obstacles to ensure this event go successfully. Every departments had their very own problems. Some even fainted due to fatigue. Fortunately, the event director was really reliable and willingly help all the committees. He indeed has an experience when it comes to leadership. I learned a lot from him. Although there were some failure to communicate adequately among the committees, he handled them very well.
Personally, I think the major problem in the event is indeed time management as I have discussed above. The problem came from myself and undeniably from some of the crews to. Although we had scheduled all the games, there was still a delay and halt of the games as some of the committees did not come to their designated place for the games on time as we had classes and assignment due at the same time. As students, we need to prioritize our study first. That is why time management skils are really crucial for us. It will not just motivate me to do my task better, it also will encourage me to be more resilient. In the future, I hope that we can handled the procrastination. This will encourage us to be better in time management.
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