Just like a dream. Employed at work as young, energetic and curious. This summer I got an opportunity to work as a counselor and trainer at the Uniglobe Secondary School and College. I could do it because I had some free months after taking my grade XII board examination. The work of counselor and trainer was filled with joy, enjoyment, wonderful returns as well as hectic schedule and work load at times. But I really enjoyed the workload as it meant that our counseling team would attract thousands of students to the premises of Uniglobe. These experiences will be useful for my lifetime as I strongly believe I am now able to handle all that work load and pressure.
This is how my journey from being a student to counselor and trainer at my very own college started. Every year the College organizes a counseling campaign for SEE graduates for providing detailed information about the Plus 2 program: Vision, infrastructures, college visit and career counseling. This campaign is bilaterally beneficial for both the students and the college, students get a wonderful chance to properly understand and visualize the college before joining it and college can showcase its strength and excellence.
The best part about this campaign is that the college selects its very own students and alumni to participate as counselors.
Just like a dream, as soon as my board exams were over, I got an opportunity to work as a trainer and a counselor at the very own college I learned all those skills from. I guess my love for college made me love all the workload and pressure and the work there felt very smooth and fun. I had my fellow friends with me to begin this counselling campaign early. It was just four of us in the beginning but with the work flow increasing new counselors joined in. All these student counselors were really outstanding students and talented in both academics and CCAs with very good speaking skills. All of us were properly trained, oriented and examined by the college administration before joining the counseling team.
With all the fun and privileges that comes with being a counselor more responsibility and work arises. Uniglobe trusts its students and believes they are more capable and effective in the overall counseling campaign as they can connect to this generation and can smoothly communicate.
As a counselor and a trainer, I had two-fold responsibilities.
Firstly, I had to provide public speaking classes to the SEE appeared students. These classes lasted for 3 weeks which were divided into 2 shifts, morning shift and evening shift. Almost 100 students appeared in these regular classes and teaching them was so wonderful as I was able to share my experience and learnings. And my students were also very brilliant as they were learning very quickly. I also provided them classes on debates and presentations according to the international formats and standards. We organized competitions too and rewarded them for their learnings. This way the students were able to gain a quick sneak-peak to the awesome classes and learnings they were going to have after enrolling in college.
Secondly, my primary duty during the early days was to facilitate college visits to the SEE appeared students, assist them and provide career counselling. Providing orientation to those visitors was my key task and slowly, as the days passed by, we had some new juniors in the counselling team and being a senior student, my duty was to teach them about overall college visit procedures and train them with good speaking skills. Luckily all the juniors were already so talented that it didn’t take them much time to learn. During the peak days the work load was very hectic and full of pressure and I had to sit as an invigilator during exams, operate from the control room and manage the crowd that appeared for the interview etc.
What I learned
One of the key experiences I obtained during this whole counselling campaign was giving public speaking training to more than 300 students at once. We used to have institution visit frequently at our college and students of these institutions liked our public speaking classes so much that they invited us to share those experiences at Jamal Nach Ghar in front of more than 500 students and the best part was I was sharing the stage with Kulman Ghising, Himesh Panta and many more wonderful personalities and artists. Getting this much exposure at such a young age was something extraordinary.
The major challenges I faced during this counseling session was the pressure of managing the crowd. The crowd would suddenly appear in the number of thousands during the peak days and with such sudden increment of crowd without pre-notice or information would lead to an unmanaged environment. But thankfully we the counselors were skilled enough to deal with such situations. Sometimes the fellow counselors would be really exhausted and then trouble would arise. Other times the workload would be the biggest challenge.
Reflections and takeaways
Although many consider these types of counselling campaigns only as a way for gaining monetary benefits, its scope goes far beyond. Students like me get a very comfortable and ideal environment to work, showcase their practical skills and learn from the experienced professionals as they are working in their own college, a place where they are valued, groomed and most importantly cared for. This was the main reflection of learning I got from this overall counselling campaign. It helped me to be prepared for future challenges, workload, market competition and how to survive the pressure.
I hope this counseling campaign continues next year too and many more students get these wonderful chances to shine for themselves and the college.
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