Project week Exploration
Project week is an opportunity for students in G10 to travel to any organizations or companies in Japan to find out more about their future goals in life, start thinking about what needs they want to serve in the world and get a better insight into potential careers.
Preparations
Preparations for Project Week started really early, from January when we arrived at ISAK right after winter break. This early preparation helped us to have a better idea of what we need to do in the next months.
The activities during the preparation process include:
- Venn diagram about our strengths, love and needs in the world
- Interview with a young leader of a non-profitable organization: Riley to see how her organization begun and how she could achieve this success
- Interview with our friends, and parents to have a better understanding of our own self
- Draft and think about issues in our home countries, and what we want to solve in the world
- Initiating a plan for project week: types of activities, documents to go through
- Permission to leave campus
- Risk assessment form
- Budget planning
- Airbnb, contact information form for safety.
After having planned a detailed schedule of all the activities that I'm doing in project week, I started writing up interview questions with my friends to make the best out of the interview opportunity that I got from people. This process includes researching about the company and thinking deeply about what I have not known about them yet, and it takes place 2 weeks before departure.
Lastly, we had to write emails to the companies to remind them of our meeting dates and thank them for accepting the request.
Travelling to Tokyo for the first time, without being fluent in Japanese
I think this was the most challenging thing for me during my trip. I was to rely on my own to buy train tickets and to know what line to change to at the station without having wifi or help from adults.
I was always scared if I waste money and got on the wrong train but I think that this experience of traveling on my own was something that helped me a lot in believing in my abilities and being more experienced in travelling in a foreign country.
Activity 1: Interview with Tell organization
meeting Vickie and Sam at Tell
Key Learnings:
The interview opened up new perspectives about counseling to me.
Tell organization has a core team of only 5 people, but they divide the work among everyone very efficiently (most of the time, each person has to take on multiple roles). Although Vickie is the main counselor of the hotline, Tell recruits a large number of volunteers who work part-time at Tell to manage phone calls from the hotline and the anonymous chatbot.
Working at Tell can sometimes be a lot of stress because of the frequency of being exposed to negativity and pessimism. There are also cases that people who are receiving support from Tell are too dependent on the organization or they break the boundary set between the counselor and the patient. Taking into consideration this fact, Vickie usually organizes meetings and counseling sessions for her own volunteers and co-workers in order to ensure that all of the people at Tell feel okay and have the emotional stability and capacity to help others.
I was also surprised by the number of people who need support from Tell every day (about 7000 calls each day, and usually the calls are just English speakers who are living in Japan). The figures indicate that mental health is a big issue in Japan, and from the stories, Vickie has told me, I learned that there is still much that Japanese government needs to do to solve the problem. In order to help this mental health issue improve, laws, legislation and policies should be more open towards international degrees and license in working in the fields of mental health, and in the future, hopefully, create fundings for the issue.
I was also assured of my biggest fear that previously prevented me from digging further into this field: the fear that talking to negative people all the time will make me a negative person. From the system that Tell works and supports their workers mentally, I believe that my emotions and feelings will be okay after a long day of work.
activity 2
Visit at Sinary about marketing
I visited Sinary because I was interested in the different types of marketing that they used to promote their cosmetic products.
Their marketing campaign was very unique, as they did not use advertisements or large banners in public places like I expected, but they used the spreading of words among their users. They hold meeting and information sessions about skincare and their products to welcome new users, and from the positive feedback they get, the products will be more popularly spread.
Sinary has a vision of changing Japanese women's view on skincare product so this is a sustainable and effective method of advertisement for them.
ACTIVITY 3
FUNDRAISING SESSION WITH SEIKO-SAN
In this session, I learned about the basic process of fundraising, what websites are useful for personal-purpose fundraising and important skills that I need to mprove on in order to be a fundraiser.
What surprised me that what is most important for Seiko-san when working as a fundraiser is not to have the best convincing skills in the world, but rather to find connection and be passionate about the mission you are serving. From the passion that you have, your conversations with potential donors will be naturally more convincing and you will be motivated to put more effort into the work.
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activity 4
miraikan science museum
From the visit to Miraikan, I learned more about concepts in Science. There was a game about the sustainable future of humanity that taught me to think more about the future.
I was also interested in the way the information was presented in Miraikan- it was very interactive and the audience can actually touch and experience what is happening in the display, different from traditional museums. This is something that sets Mirakan out from other museums
aftermath activities
After our purpose explorations, we went back to ISAK and shared our thoughts about the experience with our friends and had another session about how we can apply the things we learn to build an imaginary company of our own.
Activity fair about our own company: explain how it works and the purpose of the company.
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this activity gives me inspiration to