#1streflection

The day we came, since then we are learning, performing and attaining leadership roles along with the visits to different places further syndicates this quality in our personalities.

Leadership is an atttibute that you sometimes learn through academic experiences and sometimes just through fun exercises. I am team lead of a small club at my university that works for community welfare. I have been working at this position for 6 months. It is then I realized that leadership is not about giving orders and direction. Its all about how you move with your team towards your goal. In the process, you will have to do work with your hands despite being leader. We took leadership classes at SUSI program. Initially I thought that it is something that you cannot teach in classes. But after some classes, I realized it was never about teachin you leadership. It was totally aboutwhat leadership can do to you and how great leaders react under pressure situation. We went to Food bank previous week see how a unique thing works. There is no concept of food bank in Pakistan. Due to a broken arm, my movement and participation was restricted so I was only incharge of writting labels on the food. I enjoyed the work because we worked like a team there. On the previous Friday, we had our mock election simulation at ILC. Our group grabbed the best debate award and our candidate was the 2nd best. This simulation gave me a very important lesson of my life; when all the members in a group are leaders in some way or the another, it is better to step down a bit in your team for collective benifit. See nothing happened, and we enjoyed the simulation and also won award for best debate which was not even thought off. In the end, its not about leadership, its always about teamwork.

July 1, 2017 First day at Amherst, 7000 miles away from home still felt like our second family warmly welcoming us.It started with hunting around the city completing the tasks by mutually resolving the clues in team and exploring the city.This scavenger hunt taught me an ideal definition of leadership.To be a successful team everyone who is a part of it needs to set a direction and build a vision mutually so that they can create something new.It is a dynamic and exciting process to keep people engaged with that vision so that the goal can be achieved. July 4,2017 Independence Day celebrations all around and we were lucky enough to experience Independence Day parade of many years old trucks and other monuments.BBQ in the evening and fireworks at night, every bit of the day was full of first time experiences.With Anna and Frank crazy handshakes and adventures were all some one would wish for at a place like Groff park.To make it a perfect leadership session our instructors planned scavenger hunt with a GPS tracker to use along the way to find riddles.In addition to this we were given wordles to solve on way and do as many challanges as we can within a limited allowed time.To make it go smooth we as a team divided our roles which made it easy for us to win the game.we learnt an important lesson to stay focused and united because leadership is all about mapping out where you need to go to “win” as a team.

Okay wow! So I am still unable to wrap my head around the fact that I am one of the participants of the SUSI Exchange Program. It has just been a week and I have experienced so many things already! Even the smallest of things like talking to strangers and walking 5 to 6 kilometers is unusual for me. Exploring the entire Amherst, taking a bus to Northampton all by myself is all very new to me and I actually feel that for once in my life I am able to take decisions for myself rather than being dictated by the society and its norms. I have been introduced to a new and broader perspective of freedom. Spending an entire day with an American family and meeting so many Americans was one of the most enlightening experiences of my life. I realized that there are so many differences in our lifestyles and culture and yet we are similar in so many ways. The Americans are extremely punctual and if they ask us to report at 10am we HAVE to be there till 9:55am which is not usually the case in Pakistan. Also, the young adults here in USA are very independent, they mostly pay their college fees themselves and are not reliant on their parents and I admire this a lot about them. However, despite of these differences, the people here in Amherst are keen just like us to break the cultural barriers and the bad stereotypes associated with them. The people here I have interacted with so far are surely the nicest ones and I am really looking forward to spend my next four weeks in USA.