Precious Aaliah Salsabila Virnandi - 8B

In the busyness of being a student and an organization member, it's important to be able to organize, manage, and keep yourself calm amidst all the chaos. Organizations force us to step out of our comfort zones and push ourselves to do our best. To do this, we need three things: 1. Leadership, 2. Teamwork, and 3. Persistence. 

This Friday (01/03/2024), GEC led a seminar called GEC Talk consisting topics of leadership, teamwork, and persistence, presented by our guest speaker Kak Alken Ardova from @pakgurualken. 

Kak Alken started with a presentation of main points regarding leadership and teamwork. To be in an organization, it is required to have a sense of leadership in yourself, while also being able to collaborate with others. Through his presentation, he breaks down the main points of how crucial having the skill of being able to lead and work together is, and the main reasons where we fail to do as such. 

The first 2 points in his presentation focused on change and persistence. He walks us through experiencing change in a group environment and how to keep things organized and communicate well with our peers. Points about the importance of exchanging views and consideration of others, in a way that is productive and respectful. 

He discussed our last point, persistence, through a walk down memory lane of his past experiences, at the same time connecting them to ours. Correlating between his experiences of signing up for competitions, scholarships, and internships, he accentuated the importance of being persistent and patient in everything you do and being confident in yourself to achieve our ambitions.

To put this to the test, Kak Alken divided us all into smaller random groups and started a mini team-building activity. He started by giving us sheets of paper and gave us a simple instruction: somehow transform these sheets of paper into the tallest tower as fast as possible. In order to do this, we had to communicate with our team members clearly and as quickly as possible. He then gave us two extra sheets of paper, which represented change. We had to somehow incorporate “change” into our projects, affecting it by having to make compromises but also still reaching the end goal.

This team-building activity gave us a peek into the challenging task that is teamwork, which requires us to communicate through change to push through and reach our aspirations.

Let’s turn back the clock a little to the preparation of organizing GEC Talk. GEC members also put their leadership, teamwork, and persistence to the test way long before this seminar took place. Members of the GEC Leadership Division exercised their teamwork by collaborating on arranging and carrying out this seminar, with additional help from our teacher supervisor Ms. Riza. 

Overall, this GEC Talk experience gave us important points on leadership, teamwork, and persistence we can use forever in our future through not only attending the seminar, but also by organizing it. In the future there will always be obstacles we will come across in group environments, but the lessons we can take from this seminar will hopefully help us in overcoming them.