kudos, student leaders!

I have never appreciate student leaders that much until I became one. And now, there are times that I don't even understand myself on how I am tiring myself out for this.

Student leaders sacrificed a lot just so they could lead. We sacrifice our time, we almost don't sleep whenever we have to prepare for our events. We give our talents for free, and we represent and serve our co-students at the same time. We don't even earn from joining an org, actually, we're the one spending our own money since we don't even receive financial support from the university.

But with a message like this, all that we have to sacrifice are indeed worth it. Anyway, we just had our last event for this semester and allow me to share about this specific event we had just to give you an idea about what we do on our organization.

As early as August, before classes has began, we already had our planning for the activities which we will conduct for the academic year 2022-2023. As part of the planning, each of the members are required to prose an activity then we sort all of it and see what activities are feasible for us to conduct.

And one of those activities we agreed to conduct is our first-ever "bootcamp 2022".

Even before we became officers, we have been planning to conduct a bootcamp to enrich the skills of our members. But who would have thought that this supposed to be organizational event will be conducted nationally with our eleven partner school organizations all over the Philippines.

So, the official title of this bootcamp is "Voyagers of Excellent: Navigate from Mystery to Mastery". We got a lot of good suggestions so we decided to conduct it as one event through this one. This is a month-long event, divided into four minisodes with various topics entitled: (1) The Future of Content Marketing, (2) The Art of Dubbing and Narration, (3) Get a Grip: End the Stigma and lastly, (4) Speechless to Limitless.

We conducted this event during Saturdays which started on October 29 and the last minisode was conducted earlier today, November 19 and all I can say is that I am just so relieved that it's finally done after one long tiring month.

Actually, I am not directly involved with this event for I am not the activity head nor one of the activity coordinators on this event. But as the technical department head on our organization, I have become involved to the implementation of this event. I am heading our income generating project because as I have said we don't receive financial support so we have to make it ourselves but I will talk about it later on once we're done with all our tasks with regard to our IGP.

Going back, let me walk you through on each of our minisodes as well as the problems we encountered on the implementation of our event for the past four weeks.

The Future with Content Marketing

As marketing students, we also offered something related to our field. This is mostly about the digital transformation of marketing and the future well have with it. For this event, we had Ms. Ellen Velasco, a social media strategist at Peridot Manila and also an alumna from our university as one of our speakers. We were also able to have Mr. Alec Cuenca, a content creator with over a million follower on TikTok and a Keynote Speaker to be with us on this said event.

One of the problems we encountered in this event is that we had Typhoon Paeng that day. Our guest host in this minisode is from Bicol and the typhoon there is quite heavy so the Chief Executive Officer of our org who is also the project head for Bootcamp 2022 has to takeover with the hosting. But just as we resolve one problem, here comes another problem when our new host lost their internet connection on the same day of our event. Their neighbors lost their internet connection too so she has to travel to a nearby barangay to have internet connection.

The engagement for the activity was also quite poor that day but still, at the end of the day, we were able to conduct a successful activity despite all the problems we encountered.

The Art of Dubbing and Narration

The following week was about the mysteries of voices we just usually heard on screen. In here, we were able to invite Mr. Bryan Dave Perez and Ms. Camille Palma who are both professional voice artists as our guest speakers.

We didn't encounter a lot of problems with this event aside from the normal tech difficulties that we can easily deal with. The only downside here is that we weren't able to have the engagement we were aiming for.

Get a Grip: End the Stigma

Third minisode was about mental health. This has brought us deeper understanding about mental health through our speaker, Ms. Ronieth Dayao who is a content creator and a mental health advocate. Also, I deliver the closing remarks for this activity.

As ironic as it is, the topic was about mental health but this was the most stressful minisode for us for one of our speakers didn't show up and didn't give us a single explanation until now. The day before the event, she have confirmed her attendance but on the day of our event, we tried all means of reaching her our through chats, calls and email but no word from her until now. To give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe she had an emergency that day, or anything she has to attend to, but I still think not informing us about, not explaining about it and not even giving us a simple apology for it is just so unprofessional of her. Still wishing her the best though.

Another problem here is that we experienced a copyright strike due to the dance intermission number we played. There seems to be a copyright problem with the music that has been used. All the viewers on our livestream were gone so we had to stop streaming and start a new stream again.

There are a lot more problems we encountered this day and that will take me a long time to share them all. But what matters here is that we somehow managed to turn this event into a successful one despite all the hassle.

Speechless to Limitless

Finally, down to our last episode. Earlier event was about public speaking and both our speakers were really great. One of the speakers is Mr. Karl Fajardo, a national public speaking champion and an international awardee. I was really impressed by his presentation and his discipline with regard to time because he followed the 15 minutes time that we gave him. One of my favorites so far! And the other speaker was Ms. Gen Lee, a certified professional speaker. She had a very interactive discussion and I admire her dedication for still doing the talk even though she was on an expo at Singapore. We can literally hear the background noise from her talk earlier but it's fine, at least, she showed up and showed us her commitment on this event.

The only problem for this event are some tech problems wherein we were able to resolve despite the time constraint. All I can say is that I am just so proud for my tech team for being able to work under pressure during our every events. We are really getting better at this on our every events.

This bootcamp really drained our energy and the one week preparation for every minisode is crazy. But it always amazes me how we were able to do all this work just to serve other students. This is also me lowkey flexing our amazing publication materials made our very own talented members from the creatives department. And we are also very grateful for our resource speakers who are all professionals but still committed their time and shared their knowledge for FREE! Most of those speakers are being paid for doing promotions and here they are, doing free talk for us. That also made me appreciate the capabilities of our activity coordinators for outsourcing all those speakers. I don't even have any idea where did they find those people.

Anyway, this has been long already. Thank you so much for reading this far! This means a lot for I was able to share my passion for our org and as a student leader through writing this one.

And oh, we're using StreamYard in live streaming our videos on Facebook. If there's anyone here who are planning to use the platform, I can definitely walk you through it.

Again, thanks for reaching this far. Have a great day ahead!

:))

All photos/publication materials posted here are from our Facebook Page:

https://www.facebook.com/CLSUJMA