Our guest speaker this week was Abdul Kassamali and he shared a lot on his journey how he became a producer with his background in engineering. He is one of the best example of “follow your heart and do what you love”, no matter when and the circumstances. I also mentioned before on my background, I finished my degree in Fashion Marketing, I also graduated with a certificate in Baking and Pastry, but I have been working as visual merchandising and sales/supervising in high-end retail most of my life, I still don’t think it is my right call so here I am, back to school when I am almost 40 but I have no regret with my decision to pursuit my dream to be in the design field.

Back to Abdul’s talk today, he shared some of his biggest lesson he learns so far included “treat everyone like you’d like to be treated, think ahead, be smart about collaborations, compromise, tell your truth, ego, boundaries, master one thing but know it all..etc”, these advices are amazing and I feel like it applied well to almost every situations that I experienced in both school and work life.

One of the example through the program I had last quarter was for my history of Design class with professor Gabriel, we had a group midterm of 4 (pic above) for a recorded group presentation. We had to divide tasks between the 4 member of each group to do do research, draft information, finding pictures, come up with presentation style, make power point, figure how to record on app and voice over the powerpoint, just name a few. It was a big project when none of us know how to use Quicktime or other video app, and after 2 weeks in, one of our member in our group dropped out, so we all had to work with the others to carry on the weight and workload of that member. We compromised each others on schedule to meet up, we helped each others when needed, we shared the workload, we laughed, we learned how to do certain things all together, we figured things all together to build the project bring it to the finish line. Even though we just met last quarter, randomly assigned into group, we had different backgrounds, some of us stronger in speaking in public, some of us stronger in reading and find information, some of us stronger in visual to build powerpoint, but we all got along well, support each others and we all got an A- for that project. It was such fun experience for first quarter even though we had some challenges but we collab well together as one strong team.

That was my experience that I wanted to share. Thank you for taking your time to read it, see you in my next blog.