Cafe YSB is a yearly program in my community. In this program, one inspirational personality is invited to share their journey and work. Many children are often discouraged, and many parents are apprehensive when children’s future careers are not ‘conventional.’ This program aims to dissolve their doubts, and encourages them to follow their dreams. So when the registration for Cafe YSB opened, I knew I wanted to be a part. My role was to help set up the venue and interview the guest. Through this, I got a chance to enhance my transfer skills by employing communication, creative thinking, critical thinking, and collaboration skills.

1. LO1: Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth

This experience helped me identify my strengths and weaknesses. I realized that one of my strengths is public speaking. Since this was my first time taking an interview, I was afraid that I would stutter in front of the crowd or mess up my lines and say something wrong. However, none of that happened, and instead, I found myself confidently conversing with the guest. A weakness that I realized was my lack of self-confidence while sharing my opinion. While discussing ideas for the decoration, I often did not express my opinions because I did not have confidence in myself and believed my ideas to be not good enough. Identifying my strengths enabled me to discover a new thing about myself that I can later employ in other tasks. And identifying my weakness led me to try to overcome them and become confident in my skills.

2. LO2: Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process

There were a few challenges in the experience. One of the challenges was deciding the interview questions, getting them approved, practicing, and setting up the venue in a short time frame of 5 working days. This is because I had my school, classes, and assignments to complete on those days, and I tend to procrastinate a lot and pile everything up until the last minute. To overcome this challenge, I had to step up my time management skills and create a schedule by giving my tasks deadlines. For example, preparing the first set of questions by today and sending them for approval, making the flashcards by this date, etc. This caused me to improve my time management and planning skills.

Another challenge that I faced was coming up with the questions. We had limited time, and therefore we had to ask limited questions. The challenge here was to make sure that most of the topics are being covered in these questions without any noteworthy part being left out. To solve this, I applied my thinking skills, created a list of topics that had to be covered and assigned a fixed number of questions for each topic. I then framed the questions in a way that they were engaging but at the same time covered multiple significant subjects in one without any repetition.

3. LO5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

I find working with others easy. But that is because I frequently lack the confidence to communicate my own ideas and opinions because I feel like they are not good enough. This leads me to silently follow the others even though I do not agree with their point, which is not a good habit. Nonetheless, since I was the interviewer, I had to overcome my fear and give my views about the questions and which ones to ask. Similarly, I had to give my ideas while coming up with decoration ideas for the venue which forced me out of my comfort shell and helped me gain confidence. This made me realize that working collaboratively is very important as it helps develop communication skills, acts as a gateway to different perspectives and improves the way we solve problems.

4. LO7: Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions

While interviewing someone, there are a few ethical considerations that need to be kept in mind and therefore I tried my best to avoid the rise of any ethical issues throughout the interview. An important ethical consideration for an interview is informed consent. The guest should be informed about the interview and what kind of questions will be asked. For this, we made sure to visit our guest before the event and converse with him about the purpose of the event, the set of questions that we have prepared, and if he wants to remove or add any questions according to his comfort. Another ethical consideration is being open-minded to the responses of the guest. While interviewing, I was mindful to not judge the responses he gave and be open-minded and respectful while answering back. I feel that these ethical considerations are very important and need to be kept in mind in any event involving a guest to maintain their confidentiality, but also create a safe environment for them to speak without being worried about others’ judgment.

In the end, this experience helped me develop a number of learner profiles like communicator while sharing ideas, open-minded while listening and replying to the guest and thinker while coming up with ideas and questions. Overall, this was a very beneficial experience that helped me identify my strengths and weaknesses and also gain knowledge from the guest that I will apply in my life someday, whether it is while working for a group project or selecting a future goal. This event truly brought a sense of achievement and enjoyment to me.