This week quite a few members are off on fantastic adventures at various AIESEC conferences -- in Tokyo, in Tunis, in St. Petersburg. It brings me back to a year ago when I was in the midst of my own adventure at WENA LDS in beautiful Port Talbot, Wales. And it makes me think of the thoughts I came back from that conference with: I wasn't sure how, but I knew that I wanted to make an active contribution to the LC.
I'd like to see this happen; I'd like to come back from my traineeship (which is, by the way, going fantastically well) to see the LC having reached a much higher level than I remembered leaving. So, here's some inspiration, courtesy of AIESEC Almaty.
- Once my match finally goes through (thanks, MyAIESEC.net!) I will be incoming trainee no. 15 this year. And I am already aware of at least two more who are coming by this summer.
- AIESEC Almaty is, as far as I know, the only LC in the world to offer traineeships directly with the United Nations.
- At the moment, I'm participating in an AIESEC-organized project called CaseIT, which involves five companies working with groups of local college students over the course of a month to complete a detailed case study. (I'll write more about this elsewhere, as I am enjoying the unusual-for-me perspective of working on this as a representative of an AIESEC partner company.) There are roughly 40 students involved in total.
- In addition to that project, they are in the development stages of a Global Village (to take place in May), are working on their annual report, finishing off planning for a new member conference, and participating in a major national project.
The key factor here is that every team in the LC is firing on all cylinders, running its own projects and making things happen. This is a dramatic contrast to the situation that has tended to occur in Atlanta, where everyone on the leadership team works on everything constantly, and where we cannot seem to manage to work on or run two events in parallel. And while I value our culture of openness and "everyone helps out" attitude, as an LC we have to be able to multitask in order to reach the success we want and desire.
When I decided to go to Kazakhstan I knew that AIESEC Almaty was a reasonably strong LC. But I didn't realize just how strong: I don't think that by most well-rounded measures there is an LC in the U.S. that I would consider stronger (though Madison, Yale or Illinois might come close in some senses).
Like all things, AIESEC Almaty is not without its problems, and this post is not meant to be an ode to the EB here. Rather, it is a call to action and a request for each team to set a goal for themselves: to go all-out, be creative and do something to make AIESEC at Georgia Tech as successful in the rest of 2008 as AIESEC Almaty has been over the past year. You, the current and future leaders, are coming back from conferences that should have motivated you and made you re-evaluate your leadership potential. Keep the spirit alive and take the LC to the next level.
P.S. Registration for ITC 2008 in Kiev ends March 26. Get thyself over to MyAIESEC.net and apply!
Labels: challenge, goals, international conferences, itc
