A challenge??

I sit in the OCC as i write this.... for a dear friend of mine....my first on the UC campus.

This goes out to her for being such a wonderful person.

"when u set ur heart on something the universe conspires to help u achieve it"- Paulo Coelho from the alchemist

A challenge looming over one's head is always just that, if one does not believe himself capable of overcoming the challenge. It is essential to challenge oneself every once in a while because what it really does is to foster self belief. Self belief in turn helps one to probe the limits of what one believes one can accomplish beyond the possible into the impossible.
The process that a challenge utilises to bring out the best in a person is simple. The demands that the challenge poses are in terms of time taken to accomplish them and equipping oneself with the necessary skill set to get ahead in the race within the available time, while still keeping a hold on ones emotional reaction to the situation during setbacks if any. I faced a challenging situation when I was still in my junior year at college.

I happened to be the Vice president of the IEEE(Institute of Electrical and electronics engineers) student chapter in my college and had the responsibility of organising aur annual technical festival under the aegis of the IEEE. My team and I had less than two months in which to put together a national level technical festival. It was a daunting task as we had very little time in which to garner sponsorships without which it was useless to start putting the events of the festival into place along with the schedule. So we decided to have three separate teams-one for sponsorship, a second for publicity and a third for organisation of events. Of the three enlisted issues that we had to deal with, sponsorship by far consumed most of our waking hours. Probable sponsors would seem very enthusiastic to support us and we would fix up meetings in which our college representativies would discuss possibilities of sponsorship with them for hours, eventually only to get a negative or utmost a neutral response. It was sometimes really a thankless job as the organising team back in college would consistently make demands on and sometimes even deride the sponsorship team because of a severe lack of funds. The publicity team too was not far behind on that count as they required the maximum amount of funds to carry out their work. Nonetheless we strove on undeterred and ultimately landed up with sponsorship in excess of what we required!

Money was not the only issue. There were various points of conflicts between the members of the various organising teams as well which lead to an overall lack of efficiency as one member did not agree with the way of working of another. This was also a personal challenege for me as an organiser as I had to deal with people and at the same time manage huge amounts of money and constantly monitor whether or not it was being put to good use.

We did manage to pull off a great act and the fest was immensely succesful. But in the process I had transformed into a different person in many ways and emerged calmer, stronger and wiser.
I also learnt that in order for interdependence one must first learn to be independent along with allowing a little room for compromise. That was my experience of a challenge in the true sense and since it has impacted me positively I believe everybody should utilise the opportunity of growth that a challenge poses.