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 Before summer holidays, I was fortunate enough to be invited to act as an interviewer by a youth work experience scheme. The scheme aimed to help the young senior form graduates gain experience from the interviews. Throughout the process of the interviews, I played the role of a boss in a company, and I also provided the interviewees with individual advice after the interviews. They would then be assigned to different posts for work experience during summer.
At the end of summer holidays, I was again invited to attend the graduation and sharing session of this youth work experience scheme. At the session, I found many students with familiar faces. Looking back again, I realized that they had been the interviewees during my interviews. Surprisingly, all young people had become much mature and sophisticated shortly after summer holidays. Properly dressed, they greeted me actively. I am confident that such work experience does help them gain a lot in working and handling matters in future.
During the sharing session, one of the students impressed me most. This student was arranged to work as a clerical staff in an office. His routine was photocopying, answering phone calls and handling correspondence. Initially, he depicted his job as simple and tedious as he merely spent around half day completing all the tasks assigned by the superior. However, he got used to finding out more job-related working opportunities such as cleaning, clarifying any English messages and assist colleagues actively after finishing assigned tasks. Shortly after one-week internship, his boss praised his working attitude and offered him another one-month paid-job, and he felt delighted about the respect from his company.
To be frank, he gained the appreciation from his company because of active and positive working attitude, which could not be learned form any textbooks. Recently, I shared this experience with my friend. She told me that she was encouraged by her English teacher to do more maths exercise during English lessons because she told her teacher that she had already done English classwork. As she did not want to waste any precious time, she seized more time doing maths exercise due to lack of confidence. Eventually, with her positive learning attitude, she passed both English and maths exams with flying colours.
As the new school terms starts again, I would like to encourage all students to study harder even though you have taken some subjects you are not interested. When you have more active and positive attitude, you can turn them into your interests and challenges, which in return enhance a stronger sense of achievement, rather than frustration and failures. As the old saying goes, ‘if we learn it, the difficult thing will be easy; if we don't, the easy thing will be difficult’, which means when you make efforts to study, you can find out the solution to the problems; on the contrary, you will feel frustrated and annoyed if you insist on rejecting the subjects that you perform badly. In fact, you will never succeed because your failures and successes depend on your attitudes. Thus, starting from today, you should be positive and active despite lacking in confidence or performing badly in any subjects. As mentioned in The I Ching, ‘the Heavens are in motion ceaselessly.’ Only by being equipped every day and trying to figure out anything we do not understand can we overcome fears and achieve breakthroughs as success depends on attitudes. I do hope all can find out interests in studying.
Mr. So Ka Leung
Principal
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