DISCOVERING MY “BIG GAME”

 

A quick shout-out to Daniel Priestley’s book, Key Person of Influence, that I received a free copy of yesterday. This analogy of my “Big Game” is from the section on Pitch in that book. 

Here I am at the half-way point in my degree, and my vision is getting clear for where I am, where I’ve been, where I’m going – and almost most importantly, how I am going to win this game! Learning is such an awesome process and experience! It is not a linear process, at least not a straight line anyway. It is always exponential. With every step in this journey, you acquire insight and information that becomes the building blocks of what is yet to come. And so, as you take what you’ve already acquired into the next stage of your journey, you only find yourself connecting the dots more and more. Everything that you’ve acquired so far helps you to just get even more insight and understanding, more clarity and ability to communicate and share.

I entered the running for this prize just over a year ago, in February of 2017. I knew that I was studying a Bachelor of Business but wasn’t clear on my major/s. I started with Management Concepts, Economics for Decision Making I, and Accounting for Decision Making. My life at the time turned upside around April, right at the midway point of the Trimester. Somehow, I managed to get my stuff together and still achieved two Distinctions! At this stage, I was studying online in the evenings. I knew that something needed to change.

So, in the next trimester, I decided that I was going to start studying in-person at Nathan Campus. It was a bigger campus (originally, I was enrolled at Logan, but because of life-circumstances, I had switched to online). I knew that I needed the social life of the campus. My learning style is highly collaborative. And besides that, I am a closet extrovert, despite my “introverted” demeanor. So, I studied Government-Business Relations, Work & Employability, and Mechanics of Power. Life on campus as a student was like day from night compared to studying online! I also had the same tutor for both GBR and Work & Employability, Jason McNeil, who I see now as one of my unofficial “mentors”. My experience of Work & Employability, my first real exposure to the fundamentals of HRM, was what tipped the balance for me to choose HRM as my Major. My second Major, based upon my previous desire to pursue change through Politics, was Politics & Public Policy (thus, why I studied Mechanics of Power.) I achieved two High Distinctions and a Distinction! Also, I knew that I was going to be taking up Negotiation as a course at some point, from a recommendation from Jason.

So, then my summer trimester was up! I completed Business Data Analysis and Introduction to Marketing, which were my core Business subjects, and HRM Principles – my first HRM Major subject. I learned so much! I achieved two High Distinctions and a Credit for the Marketing course. Intro to Marketing was a challenging course in terms of the assessment. I do have a knack for exams, whereas Marketing wasn’t so much just about learning theory and concepts but an application of these concepts to a real-life marketing problem – in this case, repositioning the Orchy Juice brand. It was also my first experience of a group assessment task! So, I learned quite a lot from that experience.

MY SECOND YEAR

So, I was excited (as I always am) starting the first trimester of my second year. Not only was I continuing with my Bachelor of Business, I was taking on a new project, my Diploma of Languages in Japanese. The University had advertised in the Commons on campus the opportunity to take on a Diploma of Languages as an extra aside to your degree, and I kept on seeing it, till finally I jumped at it and enrolled. So, this trimester I took up Japanese 1A and Japanese Society & Pop Culture. For my Business degree, I studied Legal Issues for Managers (my final core subject), Organisational Behaviour (HRM) and Political Leadership. So, five subjects! Reflecting on the past four months, I am really excited by the quantum leap that my studies have taken.

For Legal Issues for Managers, I participated in the P.A.S.S. (Peer-Assisted Study Sessions) Program, for which I received a Certificate for Outstanding Contribution, and an invitation to apply for a future leadership position in the program. For both Organisational Behaviour and Legal Issues for Managers, I made friends with David Mutch, a fellow business student who saw something in me! For our Mid-Semester text on Contract Law, we had decided that we were going to meet up to study for it, and I’d already been contacted by another friend Jibril and his friend Ravi, fellow Legal Issues students, who wanted to study with me. So together we formed a group of four, and I dubbed it my Winner’s Club. We all aced our Mid-Semester Test together and looked forward to continuing the fellowship as we worked our way through the rest of our semester, our ILAC Hypothetical on Corporations Law, and our Final Exam. I managed to achieve 98.5% for that course – the highest result ever for the course! And more importantly, our little Winner’s Club expanded from four to seven! I’ve received most of my results for the Trimester – four High Distinctions so far, including the two Japanese subjects! I’m highly expecting a High Distinction for Organisational Behaviour too.

So now I’m in my holiday break, looking forward to going to Mid-Semester Camp with the Griffith Gospel Students next week. I’m participating in this coming trimester in the Industry Mentoring Program, and I’ve been matched with Scott Smout, People and Performance Manager at Corrs Chambers Westgarth, an independent legal firm in Brisbane. I’ve already had my first meeting with him this past week, and I’m really looking forward to all that I can gain through that relationship in the coming three months. I’ll also be participating as a Student Ambassador for the Griffith BusinessPLUS Program. I’ll be studying Japanese1B, Negotiation (with Jason McNeil), Management Employee Relations, Business Ethics and Corporate Governance, and Digital & Social Media Marketing. For three of these subjects, I’ll be studying with David Mutch in the same tutorial groups. So, I really look forward to continuing our collaboration and expanding my Winner’s Club network.

Kaizen, the Japanese word for “Improvement”, inspires me

THE RULES OF THE GAME

So, having outlined some of my experience of the past two years, I look forward. This “game” is played in twelve-week sessions. Within these twelve-week sessions, there are assessment frameworks, and within this framework, I will work to establish Winner’s Clubs wherever I go. Being a student is fun! I am continually open to exciting opportunities, meeting new people, learning new things that build upon what I’ve learned so far, and my vision is continually being expanded. The prize is not just good grades and a degree at the end; it is the awesome friendships and connections that I’m forming along the way. It is the experience of becoming a Key Person of Influence within the learning space here at Griffith University. It is seeing my life as an instrument to help others excel, and to experience the feedback loop of other’s excellence propelling me onward to ever-increasing excellence myself.

Along the way, we have little victories to celebrate! Every assessment is an opportunity to reflect on what we’ve gained thus far, and to celebrate our achievement. Of course, with every assessment/test, there is the opportunity to miss the mark. But that is part of what makes it exciting! There is always the fear that one could over-stretch one’s self. But no one has ever achieved anything great by remaining in their comfort zone. I’m encouraged to consider my team, as I reflect over this break. Many of those who I have connected with are further along in their journey towards graduation than I am even. I want to give my energy to see them achieve their best too.

Reflection on this trimester

Having finally completed my last exam for the trimester (my Japanese written exam for Japanese 1A), I felt it would be quite appropriate to reflect a little on my experience of the past four months, especially as I really feel like I have grown in leaps and bounds in so many ways – in all aspects of commitment, certainty, and even a measure of clarity, which is quite exciting to me.

Now, this was my first trimester since I commenced my Diploma of Languages in Japanese. So my study-load increased from three courses a trimester to five! These were the courses that I studied:

1. Legal Issues for Managers
2. Political Leadership
3. Organisational Behaviour
4. Japanese 1A
5. Japanese Society & Pop Culture

Obviously, I learned a lot of things about all of the above subjects. Legal Issues and Organisational Behaviour in particular deeply enthused me in terms of content, as well as their particular assessment tasks – ILAC Hypotheticals for Legal Issues and the Personal Reflection essay, Group Presentations, and Topic Evaluations. However, what has been the most powerful awareness for me is that throughout the process of learning what has been explicitly taught to me in terms of content, I have actually learned so many things about the process of learning and different ways that I learn and organize myself in terms of my study (a kind of “meta-learning,” learning about learning). There are things that I learned on this deeper level that I know will transform my future studies. I feel, honestly, as if I have transcended the level where I have been at as a student so far, and it can only go up from here.

Legal Issues was a major exercise in the organisation of notes! It was, first of all, my first Law subject, and secondly, its final exam was my first open-book exam, where you would take your marked-up textbook and notes into the exam as a reference. I am especially indebted to the input I received through our P.A.S.S. (Peer-Assisted Study Sessions) that I attended this trimester. I don’t think I would ever have dreamed of organizing my notes through spreadsheets – which allowed rapid access to volumes of information, such as sections of legislation and cases, also allowing it to be laid out so that all of that information could be rapidly connected.

The major assessment piece for the course was an ILAC (Issue-Law-Application-Conclusion) Hypothetical, related to Corporations Law, in which we were given a scenario and we were required to extract what legal issues were involved, lay out the Law (in this case, what sections of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) were relevant, as well as related case law to help interpret it. Then we wrote an essay for the Application, going succinctly but in a detailed way through the Law and applying all its principles to the situation. Finally, we write a Conclusion which answers the Issues (which originally were written up as questions) before suggesting the Remedies that were likely to be applied by whichever relevant court. I achieved 30/30 for this assignment, and it can be found in my Portfolio.

Then the final exam for the course contained seven short-answer questions related to Australian Consumer Law (ACL), Corporations Law, Agency (in particular the Partnership Act), Employment Law and Anti-Discrimination Law, and two ILAC Hypotheticals – one related to Agency and the other to Anti-Discrimination (Anti-Discrimination Act 1991 (Qld) (QADA)). It was a serious exam, two hours long, and a load of writing. Many of my close friends in the course struggled to complete it in the time allotted. I pushed myself hard and managed to finish writing with four minutes to spare! It was the first exam in my whole year and a half at University so far that I was actually required to sit there while all the papers were collected and accounted for! I achieved 48.5 out of 50 – bringing my final result to 98.5/100!

Organisational Behaviour was a great course too! It is a part of my HRM Major, but whereas HRM Principles was more focused on the functions of HR (recruitment and selection, training and development, performance management, etc.), Organisational Behaviour was more theoretically based – things such as Personality, Emotions and Moods, Values, Stress & Well-being, Motivation, Leadership, Power and Politics, Organisational Culture and Organisational Change. Its main assessment tasks were the Personal Reflection essay, that I wrote regarding Emotional Intelligence and its impact in the workplace. I didn’t do as well as I could have (this is probably my first reflection piece) but I made up for the marks lost in the reflection aspect with marks gained in terms of depth of research and understanding of the theory. I still felt that I did get so much out of the task, and really want to take the time to dig into the research more on a personal level. I got 16/20 for that.

Another really neat element of the assessment for OB was a group presentation, and topic evaluations written about the topics that we were not presenting ourselves. My team’s case study was related to Power & Politics and involved looking at the misuse of power in the WorldCom case and consider recommendations for how such a situation could be avoided. I could probably write a whole other post to reflect on that task (as I did actually as one of the questions in the final exam was to explain the Team Effectiveness Model, using examples from my experience in the group presentation, and through that, consider what takeaways I gained through the experience). Also, the topic evaluations were questions based on the case studies and areas that the group was covering – Motivation, Leadership, Conflict & Negotiation and Organisational Culture. I really learned so much through my group experience, especially in terms of communication and organization. I really appreciated the structure that the required “group contract” gave to the exercise, where from the very beginning we had to consider what tasks and roles each member would fulfill, as well as a schedule of meetings and a rough outline of the agenda we would follow. Also, through the experience, we really built friendships and a climate of trust was a major contributing factor to our team’s effectiveness. We achieved 24.75 out of 30, which I was pretty encouraged for.

Now aside from the P.A.S.S. sessions, I was particularly encouraged to have formed with some of my friends in Legal Issues a study group. This was what I ended up dubbing the “Winner’s Club”! It was so inspiring, and once again, I really developed a strong connection and friendship with my fellow “winners”. It was this that inspired me to want to work to establish a “Winner’s Club Hub” for Griffith Business Students. I want to see that spirit of friendship and collaborative learning be magnified. I’ll be looking too to apply to be a future P.A.S.S. Leader too. So that will be awesome.

As far as clarity too, I was encouraged to enroll in the Employment Law course next year. I’m doing the Negotiation course next trimester, which was on the recommendation of a lecturer/tutor (who is like an unofficial ‘mentor’ to me – really appreciate him). When I looked at the enrollment page, I realized that both of these subjects are actually under the Employment Relations Major. So I’ve decided that instead of continuing with my Politics & Public Policy Major, which was interesting on a certain level, that I switched now to my Double-Major in HRM and Employment Relations. Also in the coming months, I’ll be involved with the Griffith BusinessPLUS Program’s Industry Mentoring Program. I’ll be meeting up with my industry mentor in the coming week for my first face-to-face meeting. His role is People & Performance Manager at Corrs Chambers Westgarth, an independent law firm. So I’m really excited to see what the outcome will be with that.

I’m also currently enrolled next trimester for:

1. Negotiation
2. Management Employee Relations
3. Business Ethics & Corporate Governance
4. Digital & Social Media Marketing
5. Japanese 1B

So now I’ve got two weeks to break, and in my second week, I’ll be at the Mid-Year Camp with Gospel Students Griffith. The theme this year is Freedom. So looking forward to coming back, refreshed and renewed in my vision for another four months of increase.