By, Rizalul Durrun Pasundani (University of Indonesia)
Book, love and party are words that represent student life. To achieve maximum value of our study in university we have to make those three magic components balance.
And what exactly do those three components mean? I will describe it as comprehensively as possible.
What do you imagine when you think of the word “design”?
Furniture, architecture, or computer graphics?
How about climate change, invention, or medicine? These are the many facets that Guiness World Record holders, Nobel Peace Prize winners, and contemporary artists talked about this past weekend at the annual Design Our Tomorrow (DOT) Conference 2011.
DOT Conference Nov 12, 2011. Photo Credit: Trevor Haldenby
Our Head Ambassador in Georgia, Tamar, has just published her new blog. Check it out! Learn more about this fascinating country, and find out more about an initiative, Speak Up! Georgia that Tamar has been working on over the past few months.
Barbara is a StudentEvents.com Campus Ambassador at Newcastle University in the UK. Read on for the latest update of her senior year project - to be a management consultant for a real-life client. Each week she tells us more about the ups and downs she’s experiencing. What will she get up to next?
Locating the clients’ headquarters in the nearby, yet unfamiliar town was a little bit of a challenge this dark and windy (and swarming with Halloween costumes) late Monday afternoon. As luck would have it, we stumbled upon the elusive offices just in time for our meeting, but that feeling of reassurance grew increasingly irrelevant within the twenty minutes or so we were made to wait for the clients to show up.
I guess I’m still trying to ‘just accept’ the fact that clients cannot be relied on to respond to e-mails or phonecalls, to be reliable, accommodating or helpful, to keep all appointments, and most definitely (and quite obviously) to be wary of our deadlines and be accordingly cooperative. And while I understand all this, appreciate they are extremely busy, and admire the work this nonprofit organisation is doing, and that this work is their priority….
Just knowing that this project is worth a quarter of my entire degree makes the situation a bit frustrating.
However, fthe ladies we were meeting seemed very enthusiastic and passionate about the project we will be working on. While I (for reasons such as the confidentiality agreement we all had to sign) cannot disclose any specifics about the organisation itself, I can tell you that the main issue we will be dealing with is the fact that this nonprofit organisation does not attract many males, and that includes both service users and volunteers.
Our job will be to first find out why this is (using the likes of focus groups, interviews, surveys and shadowing activities for the primary research), and then come up with feasible, practical and ethical solutions to overcome the problem.
Our first deadline, on the other hand, is next Monday’s client proposal presentation, and for that we will simply present a plan for our work. This will have to be approved by both our module leader and our client, who will let us know whether we’re on the same page, and whether we get the go-ahead.
