LO3 – Planned and initiated activities
LO4 – Show commitment and perseverance
LO5 – Working collaboratively
The first weeks of my group’s ongoing planning sessions during mentor time included investigating the area in which we are planning to travel to: Sichuan, China. We located it on a map to get a visual sense of its whereabouts as some of us haven’t yet travelled to this area of China, including myself. This proved useful when researching the flights that landed in Sichuan’s capital city, Chengdu. We used online flight booking sites such as Expedia and SkyScanner to find a flight that was within budget (S$1000 per person), yet safe and well-reviewed. This was a difficult task seeing as the the flights would only meet one of our requirements at a time (see Figure 1).
One of our issues as a big group, was staying under budget and communicating efficiently with our activity provider. We were seven because I had initially removed myself from the group, and given my spot to someone else, as it was unclear whether I would be allowed to go on this trip in the first place. However, with our combined efforts we were able to adapt the plan to our group of seven, and make the budget work. It was difficult though, because some of us needed to buy visas in order to stay in the country, and this made our budget very expensive. With our problem solving and communication skills, we tried to cut other unnecessary parts of the budget, which included negotiating with our activity provider for a cheaper package. Although this would affect the quality of our trip, we decided the sacrifice was worth it, because our main focus was on the hike, so as much as the cultural experiences would have been an educational, fun way to learn about Sichuan, we were ready to do what was necessary in order to accommodate for more people. We were able to cut down our budget by $200 (see Figure 2).
I am very grateful to my group members that they did not abandon me, or give up and blame me for making things difficult. Although, at first I definitely felt like an annoyance to them as they had already done some work to work towards their plan, and completing all of the (tedious, but necessary) planning documents without me, so I had to prove that I too was willing to put in the work. I tried my best to contribute and use my cautiousness to develop the risk assessment and identify the best, yet affordable local hospitals at every point of our hike, and help ask the relevant questions to construct an email to the activity provider. All in all, I believe our group was extremely flexible, organised, and showed initiative. We had completed our planning document before the other groups that we knew, and the only comment that was made on our planning document by the project week supervisor, Agatha Toth, was to include the detailed itinerary (which we were waiting on our activity supervisor to send us).
Before COVID-19, our group planned a back-up project in case our first one wasn’t approved due to the unreliable flights. We rushed to make this one, which was a similar hiking trip, except the location had changed to Indonesia. We chose this place because it was closer than Sichuan, and at the time it reported no COVID-19 cases. We were planning meetings outside of the assigned planning times during mentor time, in order to finish the planning document. Things went quicker this time round because we had already gone through the steps, however we needed to do new research on flights, accommodation, hiking packages, itinerary, etc. We were starting entirely from scratch, but since there were many of us, we were able to get it all done after school. Unfortunately for all of our planning, we learned that project week would be cancelled due to the increasing rate of the virus. We were all disappointed, as to be expected, because we had invested our time and efforts in a plan that didn’t work due to factors outside of our control. But, looking on the brighter side of things, I was able to see that the skills we used during the planning process are generally valuable to approach similar, big projects, and the planning experience that we shared as a team was equally important to learn how to work effectively among friends, especially if there are stronger personalities in the group than others.
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