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Comp Fair’19
Comp Fair ’19 is a two days program organized by PERSAKA on 12 December and 13 December 2019, it is the largest annual IT event held with specialty of academic and IT knowledge by students of School of Computing. It is held to give exposure and enhance student’s skill related to the computer by holding activities such as academy talk, comptizen talk, forum and town hall. The main theme of this program was “4th Industrial Revolution as business and IT mining balancing”.
The opening ceremony was held at Dewan Kejora, the organizer had invited the Dean of Faculti of Engineering, Prof. Dato’ Ir. Dr. Mohammed Rafiq bin Dato’ Addul Kadir and Chairman of School of Computing, Assoc. Prof. Ts. Dr. Wan Mohd Nasir bin Wan Kadir to join the students for the town hall session. Comptizen talk was mainly the interaction between speaker with audiences for a certain topic. The topics for Comptizen talk include “Manage Stress and Obtain Peace of Mind”, Making your CV Irresistible”, “Building Mobile Application Efficiently using Software Architecture” and “Design The Right Things & Design Things Right”. For academy talk, it was conducted by highly experienced people for student to expand their knowledge of computing, the topics was “Machine Learning Using Phyton”, “Design Modern and Elegant UI/UX with Figma” and “Basic of Capturing the Flag”.
From what I’ve experienced it is just like any other sharing program however it is a good experience for those students who involved as the topic also interesting and student can grab this chance to interact with the highly experienced people. By becoming the crew, this program taught me on how to handle documentation for sponsorship and how to lead the unit in short amount of time on top of hectic months as we are nearing our final examination.
How does this experience would help me later on during my internship or working field? Well first of all I think it would definitely help me on my soft skills, handling documents is not as easy as it seems, I need to communicate with several people just to obtain signature for the documents. Obviously, it would definitely enhance my communication skills as I am under sponsorship unit where I’m requires to negotiate and talk more with outsider to promote this event. Besides, I also get to enhance my ability to adapt to the culture of new communities and work as I requires to work with several people I do not recognize before.
Before this program, I had joined many other programs that might help to improve my soft skill, besides, my work experience I think also does play important role helping me to confidently talk with strangers. In the same year, on April 2019, I’ve joined MERAK 19’ as the crew of the annual dinner. During those time, I rarely talk with my teammates unless necessary and we only start to interact and talk a lot more during the event. Thus, from there I’ve realized that to communicate with my members, I also should play the role to initiate the talk as they might be as shy as me and also wait for someone to initiate the discussion. I think it is important to always initiate it and do not wait for others as the advantage and improvement is for me.
In addition, other program also helps to enhance leadership skill, however, this program is different from any other program I’ve join before as I never personally handle sponsorship documents and lead the unit for a while. Before this program I had another program where I was required to help the other unit to search for sponsorship, but I think the experience is much more worth in this program where I had the responsibility in carrying out the duties. Although I’ve learnt the basic things on how to communicate and promote the program to the company assigned to me, but through this program I had learn more technique on how to speak and negotiate with the company we target more politely and do not seems like we are begging and urging them for the sponsorships. I do have knowledge on how to promote before from my working experience as I used to work as sales assistants in Guardian Sdn. Bhd. however, those promote skills that I’ve learnt is so much different from what I’ve learnt through this program.
Furthermore, although among my friends I am usually the leader of the team project, I found that working as a leader to my friends and some people I don’t talk before is bit different. With friends we know their attitude and their behaviour, thus, I think I need to observed and communicate with team members frequently to be more familiar with their working style.
During the preparation of this program, we were divided into units to fasten the pace of each unit’s progress as we are targeting to held the program in 1-month time. Most of the time, we were working individually and report our progress to the unit members in Whatsapp group. At the beginning of our progress, we were doing well, however we did not manage to get any sponsorship from targeted company. It might perhaps due to the time constraint and some error in the sponsorship documentation that we did not realize in the early progress, it was later that we realize the documents have some error and it was too late to correct it as we only have couple of days before the program was held.
As I mention before, the program was held for two days. However, during the event, some session was held synchronously thus, the problem that I’ve observed was students are forced to choose which they want to attend, it is unfortunate for those who want to know and hear both topics. The event was also not so welcome and the attendees is not that crowd which I think was due to unsuitable timing. There are also food trucks at the parking during the events, unfortunately, as the event was held during the last week of semester before study week, most of the class was cancelled and the faculty is not as crowd as usual. One of the reason lies behind is I think due to time constraint, as the program president want us to experience on how to handle program in just one month, we challenge ourselves to make preparation for everything in one months although at the end, the program was postponed for about 2 weeks, the time constraint does make us feel the hardship during the preparation period. Fortunately, the event was successfully held but I think a leader should first able to lead and influence team members to complete given tasks and influence team to work effectively with others to accomplish common objectives.
Therefore, by joining this program it made me realized that firstly, I think for more effective event it is important to not rush the preparation although it is okay to challenge ourselves but the pros and cons need to be considered before we decide to rush the things. We could also challenge our selves to finish all the preparation earlier rather that straight away set the time limit and rush the work because as we know a good event is due to the good preparation beforehand.
Next, due to the event was held during unsuitable timing where we were busy with assessment and preparation for presentation of our project and final examination, but it is important for me to balance my schedule in order to adapt the ability to work effectively under pressure. I realized that I’m tend to easily get stress if I am under pressure, thus I think I need to carefully manage and handle the stress and improve my schedule planning. Although my pace to make myself able to work under pressure might be slow, but I think by practicing and improve myself might help me adapt to the working environment later.
Besides that, I realized that being shy won’t help me to expand my knowledge and finish the given task perfectly. Thus, I need to initiate the discussion among members and communicate with the seniors more often so that I able to learn more than waiting for the instruction to finish the task. I also need to grab the chance to learn as many things as I can while participate as the crew and the organizer of the program so that I can improve for the next program that I might participate in.
Furthermore, this program help me to gain experience to handle documentation and lead the unit, as I am going to pursue career of being a Software Engineer, I need to be able to handle documentation and I need to be able to communicate and tolerate with different people with different attitudes, thus, I think this program help to improve some of my soft skill for a better future and obviously it make me able to help my future stakeholder who going to constantly need to communicate with me.