Michelle Lee's Blog

So as part of our first  blogging assignment for COMM 299, we’re required to discuss anything related to our “greatest achievement”. Very vague.

Thus, I’ll start by saying: I have no specific ‘greatest’ or ‘proudest’ achievement. There’s just daily achievements, some really good achievements within the month, the term, and then there’s those special achievements that one has to pour years of effort over – most of mine are academic or personal-based ones.

But given that this is for a COMM 299 class and that I’m probably being reviewed by a fellow Sauder peer – I’ll quit beating around the bush and pick something that’s slightly recent and that I’m particularly proud of:

My proudest achievement was: getting into UBC in the first place.

Coming from a background of which I had less financial backing (because in truth – my family didn’t have much to begin with), and growing up in what I would say was a ‘rougher’ environment because of the fact that I grew up in a family where a great deal of pressure to be independent was placed on my shoulders at a young age – a burden I didn’t want to bear and resisted for the longest time – I found the concept of studying difficult. I lost interest in it quickly from young age because I grew up with school and academics being as something forcefully imposed one me, something that grew to be a huge annoyance and nuisance and knawing away at potential time for my recreational time as a kid. I grew up despising my studies, and to an extent, those feelings are still sort of lingering even today whenever I come across any particularly difficult assignments.

But during the process of highschool, I met the right people, the right friends and the right teachers and mentors, that metaphorically speaking ‘showed me the light’ in having a good education. It was during my last few years of high school that after meeting these special people that I decided to reform my overall perspective and method of studying: I picked a loose dream, set myself some academic goals grades-wise, and built a schedule. Building the schedule wasn’t easy either: it involved laboriously attending workshops and asking for help from all sorts of sources to try and reform my work ethics, and admittedly at times I had to be forced to do work by various people.

And I suppose it did sort of pay off in the end after doing my final school examinations and  getting the shiny envelope with the letter holding gold UBC font with my Sauder acceptance letter – which I acknowledge to be one of the most competitive faculties to get into in Canada, just because.

So I suppose my formula was: get inspired -> get goals -> take action -> keep getting inspired. That’s just a little summary of what I learned tactically from high school to get me to where I am today.

Which brings me to talking about what I do today within my COMM 299 class.

I could rattle on about the enormous amounts of hours I poured into my resume – the hours I contemplated on how to make my resume even better and how it got me to attempt to be more involved within UBC – but in simplistic terms, COMM 299 is a subject that helps me to think more strategically about my career path.

The resume writing classes helped because it gave me a layout to follow and enhance my grammatical and logical presentation without having to read an Oxford dictionary to figure out the best words to use, and gave me the methodical CAR statement formula to use, as well as just be able to keep my statements clean-cut, neat and straight-to-the-point without writing a resume thesis.

The interview preparation helped – it gave me a solid structure and format to follow that’d work under most interview circumstances. Plus admittedly with the mark I got, it gave me a huge confidence booster in terms of how I present myself.

Thus, I can conclude that this is a subject that gave me a stronger sense of awareness about my career path, not just relative to Sauder, but for the rest of my life.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS