What do you get if you give a young and enthusiastic senior-year-undergrad student, with a basic level of wit and whole lot of support from his college officials and his team? The answer is simple,” You get to see the young lad turn into a responsible and mature man”.
In short, my experience in KYC 2020 has been the same. If someone had said to me, few months prior to the main event, that I will be responsible to lead a team of more than 120 people in order to manage a national level youth empowering event with a crowd of more than 2000 people along with multiple national celebrities, I would sarcastically reply, “Take care now. Bye-bye then”. To be honest I still can’t believe that I was one of the key player of this mega event.
My work officially started in the late December, 2019, when my program director, Mr. Pradeep Parajuli, whom I will always honor, called me into his freezing-brand-new-almost-finished office of KMC, Bagbazar. At first he didn’t tell me that he had appointed me as a leader for Team KMC for KYC 2020.
He first inquired me about KYC 2019 and asked me about the event itself and the issues that we had faced in it. Once the explanation and discussion part was done, he asked me if I was ready to take a leadership role in the upcoming KYC event. I immediately accepted the role (who wouldn’t, right?).
He then explained about my job roles, about how I had a limited time to create a team for the event and the series of meetings that I had with Mr. Raju Tandan. Once that was done, I went to meet Mr. Raju Tandan the next day. He introduced me to his team members, Mr. Aditya Sapkota, Mr. Ashutosh Adhikari and Mr. Lokesh Khadka, whom I had already had the pleasure of working with in the last year’s event.
He then explained the details of KYC 2020, what were his expectation, the objective of the event, how this year’s event was going to be different than the last one and so on.
Once the orientation part was done, I was assigned with my tasks. In brief, I was asked to create a team of 10 core members (including myself), a team of 10 organizing members. Within a week all the team members were finalized.
The teams were responsible to conduct the pre events, which included sim distribution program (sponsor related), ticket distribution, outside-valley-college outreach program and volunteer recruitment and selection program, followed by the main event which was to be held on February 7, 2020.
Our team was assigned to conduct most of the pre events in KMC +2, Bagbazar (which had more than 3000 students). Now the real panic began. With less than a month left, we were left with a bunch of work and we had no idea how and where to start from. Many of us had some sort of knowledge on the type of tasks we were assigned with, but none of us were ready to execute those knowledge on our own. Luckily, we had Pradeep sir, who gave an insight on how to approach our tasks and taught us how and why we should track our tasks, which to be honest is something that isn’t properly explained in our text books and is something that we all need in our lives. The insight taught us why we should plan our work and how we should plan them.
We then distributed the tasks amongst ourselves and started on with our tasks. Soon, our progress became visible, which increased the team’s morale, increasing productivity. Slowly, the work pre event phase assignment was complete. The only thing left for us was the outreach program and the main event. In the outreach program, we were assigned to bring a minimum of 10 high school students from major cities and towns of Nepal for them to attend our main event. Team KMC was assigned with 3 cities of, Jhapa, Kaski and Butwal. Different people were assigned to different cities. As taught earlier, we all planned our work first. We surveyed all the high schools present on those cities and filtered those where we had any form of prior acquaintance. We then planned our strategies on how to approach these colleges of these cities/districts and then called them to set meetings with them. Once the meetings were fixed, we dispatched our team and acted according to our plan. The plan worked so well that our team was responsible to bring the highest number of students for the event. Now all that was left was the main event.
The main event in a single term was a “bang-on”. Thousands of enthusiastic youths all having a never forgetting time of their lives. Celebrities and influencers closely interacting with their followers. The event was spectacular. The event was too good to be true. After putting on countless hours of hard work, sleepless nights and a tad of enjoyment with a group of right people, I’ve learned that with the right set of people and their right set of mind, almost anything is possible. This event has brought out the hidden leadership skill inside of me. It has taught me what a true leader should be, how a leader should see and hear everyone’s opinions equally and how one’s personal biasness can hamper their leadership when working with a team.
Moreover, this event has taught me to keep pushing my limits and has brought out a never ending hunger to learn. No matter how better of a person I become, there will always be something new to learn to make myself a better one. Finally, I would like to thank all my team members and all the people who supported me to make this event a successful one. On a personal note, I would like to thank Mr. Pradeep Parajuli, Mr. Surendra Subedi Mr.Raju Tandan, Ms. Monika Pradhananga, Ms. Prakriti Karki, Ms. Rajani Neupane, Mr. Rohan Gurung and my beloved juniors who took an extra step to help me become the person I am now. Thank you KMC educational network, for this opportunity.
Nischal Sangraula is a student of 7th semester, BBA at KMC
