8 Jan/Day 5: Leaders-in-training

Starting off the day with a quote of which origins I fail to recall, “The eyes are the windows to the soul”. This quote stuck with me during our leadership workshop in the morning as we practiced self-introductions with handshakes and eye contact. Describing myself as someone who is initially introverted and shy, I find, in many other instances previous to this as well, that the simplicity of making eye contact is difficult especially with someone new because I do truly feel that by doing so, the other person can see through my walls and see who I genuinely am. While I do know that this was perhaps my excuse for being so easily nervous and an exaggerated literary truth to say the very least, it was a conscious effort to maintain eye contact.

The amazing race itself was a mix of ups and downs. We began quite messily without functioning as a true team perhaps due to our eagerness and haste and set off towards our first location without properly analyzing our clue. Faced with various challenges such as taking a longer route to our first location and being unable to work out the second clue, we were lost for quite some time. However, after receiving the answer to the clue from Hui Cong, the team spirit began to pick up and we suddenly found ourselves racing to the next location and searching for our task. Strategizing to compensate our lost time and still gather as many points as possible, we returned to the finishing location at the hotel to end our race.

Initially, I had thought that we had not done a very good job completing the race as well as work together at various points in time, but under closer inspection when we were asked to map out our journey, I found that we indeed had. While we had not started very strong, we warmed up to one another towards the end. Moreover, later in our reflection circle, through feedback from our groupmates and seniors, I was able to learn more of myself, about the weaknesses and strengths I had as a leader. Among my peers as leaders-in-training, I was happy to learn that there were various types of leadership as being one who aspires to be inspiring and strong leader, it was not a mould I had to force myself to fit into, but rather shape myself and work on various qualities as I grow. As we practiced introducing ourselves one last time, with the addition of our strengths and weaknesses as a leader, our declaration affirmed in me the determination to work on being more confident as well as vocal in this new year.

Wrapping up our takeaways from the amazing race with a personal reminder to work on my weaknesses whenever I could, we headed to Central Festival Mall to finish collecting more survey responses, totaling about 100 when we were finished. One of reasons I love this topic of youth culture is the relatability of it in the sense that as youths, we have common interests and thus, we knew where to seek out youths in order to collect data. This was exactly what we did as we stationed ourselves at the entrance of a movie theatre to ask youths to take our survey. Before heading back to the hotel for our last dinner, we diverged yet again to have our last fill of Thailand.

While we knew our time in Chiang Mai was ticking away, we still sacrificed part of our nightly trip around the night markets to gather together for a discussion to summarize our past findings as well as plan for our group report and deliverable in the coming weeks. I could feel the group and as well as myself putting what we had learned earlier today to use in utilizing our strengths as roles to play in our project work. For me, being craftier and having experience with visual arts, I took on the part of helping to design our mixed media deliverable. Of course, everyone was excellent at supporting one another and it came to me that while we were sometimes indecisive at times and were very different in personality, our strength was in supporting one another which was the very foundation that a team should have. I am really grateful for my team and happy at how we have grown throughout this trip.

For our last night in Chiang Mai, I settled in with my favourite taste of Thailand, mango sticky rice. Like this authentic taste, my memories in Thailand, an incredible given opportunity from USP, would be hard to find and replicate elsewhere.