The third BRATs workshop of the year was at east coast town, Kuantan. Again, the holiday cum work trip came just in time as August was a busy and kinda stressful month for me, with all the assignments and laboratory reports to be completed every week.
Fortunately for us (R.age team, Jessica Tan, myself and two senior BRATs, Leon Teh and Andrea Choong), we arrived at Kuantan a day ahead of the workshop, allowing us ample of time to rest and get ourselves ready. The thought of waking up at 5am and three hours drive isn’t exactly very pleasing.
We stayed at MS Garden Hotel, which is just next to Berjaya Megamall Kuantan. Heh! Damn awesome because Starbucks Coffee and McDonald’s are just a stone throw away but the food was the worst among the many hotels we stayed in so far.
Senior brats, Leon Teh and Andrea Choong were brought along to help facilitate the workshop and watch over 40 kids.
BRATs tags for the kids.
The kids registered themselves and got their T-shirts and notepads. Hann Lam, Resha Ng and Emily Chong registering themselves as they arrived at the hotel.
Ivy decided to make some changes on how the workshop is conducted this time, hoping to cut short the “lecture” sessions in exchange of more time for the mock interviews.
Instead of taking things slowly, the team would feed the BRATs with information on journalism, photography, videography, interviewing and etc. at one go and then let the BRATs put their newly learned but very rough skill into practice during the mock interviews. It is only after that the team would review their work and point out their mistakes, hoping that they would learn from it.
Stand upping, trial #1.
Haziq Azizi, is probably a born leader. Not only he was good with people (at least from my observation), he was very efficient and managed to get all the assigned tasks done on the same day itself. That of course made him into Ivy’s favourite BRAT and I felt threatened.
“Hi, I’m 16.”
That sentence made everyone laughed so hard. To be fair, he spoke too quickly and we didn’t manage to hear his name, Kan Wai Min.
They all looked so quiet in the picture but the BRATs were a noisy bunch after they settled in and got familiar with the others. From top left and clock wise, Chien Teng, Wai Min, Shi-Yuan and Sue Ann.
I also did a session on photography but it was cut short due to time constrain. As usual, had a little bit of stomach upset after that. Public speaking is still not my thing despite speaking on the same subject at three different workshops. Do check out my Prezi slides!
Then, it was time for the mock interview session, where the BRATs would interview me, Jessica Tan and Sharmila Nair.
It was okay during the first few minutes but as the “photo shoot” progressed, the “photographers” went overboard as they asked me to “eat a chair” and “steal food”.
I played along, thinking that I would give them a good sounding when we review their work later. However, the moment Ivy saw it, she was furious and instructed me to stop them from further humiliating me. :|
Then it was the interview session. It feels really weird to be interviewed since most of the time, I am on the other side, interviewing others. Some of them asked some good and relevant questions and some were a little bit off, but they did quite well for a first time.
A mug shot of me, not bad. I mean the picture, not me.
Review time came and boy oh boy, the kids got an earful from Ivy on asking me to pose for what seemed to be malicious pictures that only demean me as a person. I knew Ivy was mad but didn’t know it was THIS mad. o.0″
Anyway, the kids came to me and apologize, which I thought was very nice of them. And of course, we forgave them.
Tomorrow, the kids headed out for field assignments where they got to put their newly learned journalism skills to test in real world situations.
P/S : Pictures without watermarks aren’t mine but the BRATs like Siew Choo and whom errr… I have no idea which belongs to whose.
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