Business Club was an initiative that was taken by me and 2 friends. In this club, we had decided to teach students from grade 7 and 8 so that they can be more aware of this field and also this could help them with deciding their careers in the future. We had almost 10-15 students in the club. We had meetings every week and in those meetings first, the students were introduced to the concept of Business and then further we talked about some business ideas with them and explained about how to makes a business pitch. Later we gave them a challenge where they were supposed to come up with their own business ideas and make a business pitch to us and convincing us about why their business idea is the best and why this idea will lead the public to spend their money on such products.
Strands: Activity and Service
LO2 : Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process :
One of the main challenge that I had to take is handling the students of grade 7 who supposedly didn’t listen to us and didn’t cooperate with us many of the times. With handling, I also had to take care that I didn’t lose my cool on them because then I would end up hurting them to it was better to try to keep my cool under control. During keeping the cool time I learned a new skill of making myself patient and learned how things could be easily done without losing any cool and stressing out. This is going to be helpful for me in the future as it will help me better delivery of work without getting stressed and even my mood will be in order when I would present my work to people. Another challenge that we faced was explaining the complex business terms to students of grade 7 who had no clues about what businesses in reality do. But undertaking this challenge was fun as we also got to learn simpler terms in this subject and also we were able to teach the students about this subject in a more proficient way.
LO3 : Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
So this a voluntary plan where we came up with the plan of this club. Making a plan was easy but then taking permissions from school authorities and to add upon finding interested members was a task and that even consumed a lot of our time. This process took more 3-4 months to get all the official work of getting this club started and then getting permissions from the transport department to let the students board the bus early in the morning. After the initial process we had to start doing plannings about what all do we need to teach the students and then plan about different activities that could take place in conducting the club session. The link to the document where we planned our sessions is provided below. In the end, we all decided to take feedback from all the students so that we could use it as a source knowledge for us about our loopholes if any and then that could help us in the future in other activities.
LO4 : Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences
Commitment was necessary as there was time when the first round of forms were given out for people to come and join these clubs there was a very less response to our club and we had lost motivation to work further but then we later decided to work on this club because it was directly related to our passions of business and talking about different things in business. Commitment was also required as we were supposed to get up early in the morning and reach to the classes before the students reached and be prepared for that as waking up early in the morning is a huge task making it difficult for us to be present every time but because of our perseverance and dedication we stayed commuted to this project and completed it successfully because in the beginning there were many clubs taking place but slowly people started losing interest and they left running the clubs but it was our commitment that helped to run this club and help people learn about business. It is generally easy for me to commit to things that are of my interest like this project where I liked working with those students and spread knowledge around so it was easy for me to commit and I loved doing this CAS activity. Commitment is required as it is the thing that keeps a person going on and motivates them to complete a particular task.
LO5 : Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively
Working collaboratively for me in this project was easy as I was working with of my very close friends and thus it wasn’t difficult and thus there was no lack of communication between us making it easier for the all of us to work together and peacefully with full productivity. Generally, it is difficult for me to collaborate with people as I find myself trying to be independent and not involving people to do the work with me but this time it was easier as the other members involved were equally involved making it to be an equal contribution by all of us. I think it is important to work collaboratively as there is the presentation of different ideas and also we get to know different solutions to the same problem because of the difference in the way of thinking. Leadership in this activity was important as we had to guide the students and being there leader it was our responsibility to provide them with appropriate and genuine information. Teamwork was important as we were supposed to divide our work and also do work based on our respective skills in order to increase the productivity of the project.
By the end of this activity, I learned that there are many curious minds who would love to know about these kinds of subjects more. On top of it, I also learned the skill of managing people without losing my cool and also I came with an idea that we should have more clubs in schools in the future especially in India because that helps people try different subjects before they make the final call about their careers for the future.
Link to the Feedback and Planning Document :
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11SYB_WPowET2CshQD1hkXLlMt5QVPJmgvFcopm16giY/edit?usp=sharing
