LOOK, LISTEN AND LEARN

The past three weeks i have had to observe carefully the way things are done in the office, i have had to listen attentively to instructions given to me and i have learned!

last week i attended yet another meeting with the school management.This time around the meeting was to give a persuasive talk/presentation to representatives from different countries namely Bangladesh,China,Iran and Indonesia.the purpose of the meeting was to get the officers to sell Asia-Europe Institute(AEI) in their respective countries.It was a thorough detailed presentation on the history of AEI, programmes offered, students enrolled, the staff, visiting professors and scholarships offered by AEI.

my task was to listen and produce a detailed report on the meeting. i simply had to put my listening and writing skills to practice.everyone who knows how to write can produce a piece of writing but not everyone who knows how to write can write professionally.what i mean is that i had to write a professional report. and what is professional writing anyway? by professional writing i mean that i had to produce an impressive report, one that could sell! and yes i did write up the report,well not in one hour.after a couple of drafts and corrections only did i submit this report and guess what, my supervisor termed it 'good work', honestly i was happy with the compliment,i can only hope that in a few years i will be able to produce work that deserves to be termed 'excellent'.

Also the past week i have been assigned to identify top five universities in each of the 43 ASEM countries(made up of Asian and European countries) and identify the relevant authorities to contact in each university/college. now i must say gathering information(you may want to call it research) takes more than commitment, it requires one to be equally patient. i am pretty sure that this task sounds rather as easy as cut and paste but it was not a very quick and easy job for me. this is because in some cases different websites ranked the universities/colleges differently, say in one website Oxford University will be top of charts and in another not,also some school websites did not have contact details so you can imagine!but in any case i still had to get all the contacts details, next is to communicate with the universities!now communication is going to be easy now that there is information.

remember the secret lies in looking(observation), listening and you will learn.