Business management has always been a subject of interest for me, it allowed me to gain a lot of insights regarding concepts and problems that I might face in the future. The BM club was a club created by our peers wherein they invited experienced individuals to conduct sessions and illuminate us with the subject knowledge, the purpose of this club was to give curious students exposure to the corporate world.
LO1- Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
Opting for business management as an IBDP subject helped me realise my passion for business. I was quick to recognise my strengths, which made me confident enough to participate in this club. However, the main weakness was trusting a student led club which was relatively new to the school. It was this year when the school had officially started to have clubs, all student-led which led me to have second thoughts regarding the club. This opened up a lot more to learn and enhance different types of skills.
LO2- Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process
The most challenging part of joining this club was the time. We were introduced to this club during lockdown – it restricted us from meeting the members physically. It became obstructive for the club members to interact openly, and this eventually made the sessions slightly less interactive as it was just the speaker talking and not much input from the students. We overcame this challenge by trusting the club leaders and appreciating their efforts to make sessions more fruitful. Sessions were organized by alumni who talked about psychology and e-commerce, interviews with businesses, and our school’s BM TL led a session for personal finance, debates over ethics and many more. Undertaking a new challenge helped us realize the potential we have for the upcoming ones. Skills like creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, and social skills have enhanced immensely after this. Overcoming challenges and inheriting new skills has definitely pushed me and I think this is why learning new skills is important, it’s a part of our personal development.
LO5- Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively
I’ve always been a team player, which makes working collaboratively and learning collaboratively easier for me. The members were students who were interested in business so we understood each other through similar lenses. However, it got annoying sometimes as a member of the club as some students would ask slightly irrelevant doubts or off-track statements which would disrupt the class flow, I personally handled this situation by kindly talking to that member in person and telling him about how his slightly irrelevant inputs might disrupt the class. Other than that, the members had healthy disagreements in discussions such as ethics in the corporate world. I believe that it is important to work collaboratively because in scenarios like these, the productivity of sessions depend upon how much time we invest in useful discussions.
Final Takeaway:
This cas experience, for me, was very fulfilling and I am glad I was able to be a part of it. Even if there were very few online sessions, it increased my interest towards BM and the corporate world. I developed the learner profiles communicator since we communicated together and worked collaboratively to learn and improve our skills. As the sessions started to become slightly monotonous, I saw the efforts and passion the organizer of this project showed towards the class which made me communicate even more. The highlight of this experience, personally, was when experts joined the class and shared their views on the corporate world. This made me think that we should have these conversations a lot more frequently with a lot more peers and should invite more professional individuals to enlighten us with their knowledge, only then we will be able to measure our passion and interest for the subject and choose whether we should go ahead in it or not.
