This year I joined my school’s IFP Program and after working really hard throughout the initial 6 months (this is where the teachers evaluate you and your commitment and later use this information to select the conference facilitators) and making a conscious effort to participate more in debates and expand my social circle to help enhance my collaborative and communicative skills, I was selected for the Timor Leste Conference (my first choice).

I have been so excited to work on this trip and it has been a very unique experience for me as when we began this was the first CAS experience I had ever planned myself (project week hadn’t yet formally began) and I had never attended a formal conference myself before joining IFP. This meant that I had a lot to learn about structure tone and the types of activities that we would be working on especially as this IFP conference has been running for a few years in Timor Leste so future delegates already have expectations and preconceived notions about the type of content, activities etc. However despite how overwhelming the blank 7-day timetable looked to the group and me, we began dividing it up into daily themes and the logistical duties (organising the delegates in rooms, creating a booklet, cultural evening etc.) were also divided into groups of 4-6 people (across both East and Dover). Breaking this down into smaller chunks made the whole conference suddenly seem a lot more manageable as instead of a week I was now responsible for only a day and a half (although all facilitators assist on all days).

My one definite area of improvement in terms of planning for this conference would be my communication with Dover which is a key component of collaboration as this is a joint-campus project however we only see each other approximately once every 2 months and our schedules rarely line up (their project week and internal exams are at different times to ours so we end up missing two sessions for every event etc.). We definitely need to open a steady stream of communication especially at this critical stage as we are no longer brainstorming but rather filling in the schedule and gathering what we need to run the decided activities, we must ensure that we take everything we need to Timor as we won’t have as much as a wifi connection there so improvising activities on the spot and trying to create last-minute resources will be increasingly difficult there.