As a Facilitator

Imentor Career Fair Organized by United States Youth Council (USYC) with support from US Embassy, Nepal on 21 Jan 2017.

It was 6:00 AM when I finally walk out of my bed. I just had 35 mins to get myself ready for today’s trip to Ramdevi Secondary School, Jalkini (Sindhupalchowk, Nepal) to facilitate a Career Fair organized by USYF with the support of the US Embassy Nepal. With my full energy, I get myself ready …. And yuppy I succeeded. Well, some students were still to come. We left Nawalpur by 7:10 AM. Students were full of energy, we sang, talked over our whole journey. Happy time passes quickly.

Each school was allowed to bring the utmost 50 students, we took students of class 10 only as there were 45 students from class 10 itself. We had our morning breakfast at Jugal Guest House. The food was good, the guest house was very spacious and cozy. I had a conversation with the owner of Guest House, he was the ex-chairman of the School Management Committee of Kundaladevi Secondary School, Thuloshirubari (Sindhupalchowk, Nepal. It was nice talking to him.

We reached the venue by 10:05 AM. We were late by 5 minutes but unfortunately, organizers and mentors themselves hadn’t arrived. There arrived late by 15 mins. Then started rush hour. Around 300 students from 6 different schools and handling them was another challenge. We were already running late. But cheers to all TFN Fellows, and the Supporting the team from USYF we were able to organize everything with rapid speed despite of many challenges.

Our session started by 11:30 AM, 30 mins late than the scheduled time. I was facilitating the “Business Management, Economics and Entrepreneurship Session” along with Dipesh Maharjan as support partner and Rafael & Susma Bhatta as Mentor. Rafael was running his own chain of hostel named “SAATHI KO GHAR” in Kathmandu whereas Susma was working in Nepal Taekwondo Federation as Manager and was also studying a master in business.

We had to run three simultaneous sessions of 45 mins each. Although the content of each session was similar, the only difference was the Audience. We divided our role among each other. Dipesh leads a certain part of the session and I lead the rest. We had around 10 to 15 mins of info session about this particular sector like what does management and economics means, its status and scope in Nepal, and what to do after class 10 along with basic information on Entrepreneurship like what are opportunities and challenges in Nepal and why to become an entrepreneur. Then we had around 20 mins of Q&A session with the respective mentors where I and Dipesh asked various questions to mentors so that students could get a more deep understanding of the sector. Mentors share their life experiences, what they are currently doing, what challenges they faced, what sort of preparation one should do, what are scholarship options etc. The session was very interactive and informatory. It seems many were inspired by the mentors.

Then was an open session where participants had opportunities to overcome their queries about the sector. Participant students raised very few questions, participation was not as expected. It seems Students were feeling shy, what others would say as there were students from different schools. So I had to facilitate open sessions when required by asking some relevant questions. Very few raised queries and those queries were really very interesting. It may also be because Information was too overloaded in a very confined time. But we tried to keep our points as simple as possible and to the point. Another best part was we had reflection after each session to have sort review and to improve. So did we, our 2nd session was better than 1st and the 3rd session was better than 1st. Thanks to Rafael to initiate a reflection session among us.

Despite we had very few resources like no laptop, no projector, no speaker we succeeded in delivering content effectively, thanks to TFN training and our experience as Fellow. It was my first experience as a facilitator in such an event, thanks to Nawang Dai and Drishya Di for considering me. Our Q&A session was more like a Live TV show where hosts asks questions to guests. This method was effective.

Moreover, I had the opportunity to meet many new people from different sectors. The entire session was full of learning and new learning for me as well.