#mentor workshop

Hello everybody! Hope you are all enjoying the nice Danish summer!

It is August already, and all of us at the QA team are really excited about the Mentor Workshop that is coming up soon! As part of the preparation, we have had our own ‘training day’. Here is a few lines about what we did.

The day started at 8AM at KUA2, our home turf. Yes, it was early, and we were in desperate need of coffee and breakfast for our stomachs. So, we started off by having a nice, cozy breakfast, catching up on what we have been doing for the summer.

As we were eating some nice loaf of breads with jam and cheese, Anne-Marie, who coordinated this amazing day, and who will be co-coordinating the Mentor Workshop, dumped Lego pieces in front of us. We were all handed individual tasks to do with these Lego pieces. Some of these tasks were like having only white blocks on the 3rd and 4th layer, or to be responsible for making the 6th layer on your own.

Apparently, this was a ‘team-building exercise’ for the QA team. Interesting, right?

The rule was simple: not to tell the others about our individual tasks, and to NOT talk about the Lego construction. We were allowed to talk about anything else, just not about the Lego. We carried on with this for 25 minutes, and to be honest, we were all having question marks above our heads in how this is a ‘team-building exercise’. But we ended up building a pretty impressive crane/bird looking building. After our beautiful masterpiece was created, we all shared what our tasks were, and how we tried to complete our individual tasks. Some of us were keen on keeping their tasks, for example by throwing someone else’s Lego blocks away, and some of us were just having fun, and just started to build whatever that they could do.

This Lego activity was definitely entertaining, and we could sort of see how we work as a group. It was very useful!

After this fun activity, we went on to the guest speakers. We started off by learning about how to do project management, and with the help of Anne Kjølby, we were able to put our projects into a managerial framework.

Next, we learned about the conflicts arising from cultural differences. The guest speaker was Vijay Jain who was very helpful and gave us tips and advices on how to work with a multi-cultural environment. Jain brought a very nice student, Andra Gavrilescu, who with two years experience of living in Denmark, could tell us about her personal experiences adjusting to life in Copenhagen.

Finally, we learned about volunteering from a professional in the field, Maria Baad Holdt from Ingerfair, a consultancy specialized in volunteer work.

All the guest speakers were amazing, and we learned a lot of things. They were all very useful, and we cannot wait to implement all the great ideas into the QA Programme!

By the time we finished all the lectures, it was already 5PM, and we were pretty exhausted. But, Anne-Marie had another fun team-building exercise waiting for us!

Wondering what it was, we all went outside. There, we were given 4 plastic crates. Again, question mark. The rule was this: all members had to move finish a route by NOT touching the ground, and ONLY using the 4 crates.

Now, how to do this? It was a bit of a thinker, but Mette quickly came up with the solution. See how we managed on the pictures below.

This was FUN! After having spent all day together, including team-building exercisers and lectures helping us develop elements of the QA Programme, we think we've improved as a team.

Our training day was wrapped up with this final exercise. It was a long day, but it was definitely educational day, and it gave us some awesome ideas for our upcoming events. We cannot wait to share this with all our Mentors and Mentees, and see how it will take shape!