The Indian Cultural Society organized a Motivational Workshop for students on the 14th of March 1998 for the second consecutive year. We can well remember the barrage of questions that plagued us before we made the crucial step forward into the University. We are now comfortably settled. We wanted to help our juniors clear their minds of any doubts. Our primary motive was to encourage our fellow Indian youth to work towards a tertiary education in the university and to allow them to be in a position to make an informed choice about the various courses when the time arises.



About 100 students from various secondary schools and junior colleges turned up for the workshop. The students were enthusiastic about the whole thing. They were given files and reading material to motivate them. The workshop itself was split into 2 parts. The first included the motivational talk and an opportunity for the students to have a dialogue with the speaker. The second part included a tour of the various faculties that the students were interested in followed by an address by a panel of lecturers from the various faculties.



Mr. Viswa Sadasivan was the motivational speaker for this year's workshop. Mr. Viswa is currently the director of Right Angle Pte. Ltd. and he used to host the television programme, "Talking Point". He has successfully conducted many such workshops before and was very enthusiastic about giving this talk when approached. The students were definitely captivated by the examples that Mr. Viswa drew from his personal experiences.



During the course of the talk Mr. Viswa touched on how to cope with failure. He went on to tell the students that if they failed once, they should not give up, as there are ample opportunities for one to achieve academic excellence. He stressed that one need not be a scholar but should have the attributes of one in order to succeed. He went on to elaborate what these qualities were:

1) the ability to surmount odds,
2) to be able to deal with failure ,
3) to bring problems back to perspective and
4) the tenacity and courage to deal with adversity.

Another point that Mr. Viswa brought up was to do with our community. He said that Indians were like "crabs in a bucket". He noted that, "those who have crossed the bridge forget those who are left behind reaching out for help". He felt that we should not compete within our community but rather help each other to progress and to be on par with other communities.



There was an interesting Q&A session that followed Mr. Viswa's talk. Many of the students participated in it actively. One individual brought up a point on how our youth have come up with lots of excuses for underachieving and how we should not emphasize so much on racial discrimination lest they begin to use that as another excuse.



Once that was over the students were split up into groups of 10 according to their faculty of interest. After lunch, their tour of campus began. Students had the option of choosing to tour the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences, Business Administration, Engineering, Law, Medicine or Science. During the course of the tour students visited places like the Anatomy Museum in the Faculty of Medicine, Moot Court in the Faculty of Law and the various libraries, lecture theatres in the respective faculties. The students had an opportunity to interact with the undergraduates and to find out details pertaining to course and university life in general.



After the tour, the students were seated back in LT11 for an address by a panel of lectures from various faculties and a fellow undergraduate, Senthil. The lecturers in the panel were Professor N.E. Shanmugam (Faculty of engineering), Associate Professor Mr. K.P.Mohanan (Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences), Mr. Kulwan Singh (Faculty of Business Administration), Professor Sornarajah (Faculty of Law) and _______ (Faculty of science). The last person on the panel was Mr. Senthil from the faculty of Business Administration. He gave the students a very colourful account of his life as an undergraduate and a general idea of varsity life. The students gained much valuable information on the various faculties and the departments in them.



The students went away with the message that they should not let setbacks stop them from achieving their potential, to think positively and to look to further education with enthusiasm and renewed vigor. Judging from the students' comments we knew that our motive for the day had been achieved. Even though the number of students that responded was not overwhelming we are pleased in knowing that we made a difference in a few students lives. For all you know we might have motivated one of them to become the next Nobel prize winner.

Kannan
Medicine (II)