The Last Mile conducted a two day orientation program at Ambalika Institute of Technology & Management from 24 th -25 th January 2017. The workshop was jointly conducted by the father-son duo of Professor M.A Usmani and Mr Saud Usmani. The participants from the institute included B.Tech students from 2nd and 3rd year and MBA students from 2 nd year. A total of more than 100 students attended the program and benefited from the same. Also present during the event were several senior members of the faculty and the entire team from Training department.

The aim of the program was to orient the mindset of students towards the right objectives and to awaken them towards the necessities, requirements and realities of the careers which lie ahead, after college. Serving the aim of the workshop perfectly well, the facilitators kept the students engaged for two days and left them with some meaningful and insightful lessons.

WINNERS ATTITUDE:
In the first segment of the workshop the trainers focused on how to develop a Winner’s Attitude. The session began on a philosophical note with the facilitators asking the students to draw a parallel of their lives with a tree and compare their success with fruits of a tree and the reasons of their success as the roots of the tree. While students engaged in this simple activity, the trainers helped them imbibe a basic rule of life, that no fruit grows on a tree unless there are multiple roots contributing towards it, similarly if a successful career was a fruit that they wanted to grow on the tree of their lives, then there are certain roots which are necessary to be planted.

Taking the program ahead the trainers discussed in details the various qualities that industry and the corporate world look for, amongst the college graduates. The qualities discussed in the session specifically included:
 Self Motivation  Accountability  Honesty & Integrity  Excellence  Speed & Time Management  Optimism & Commitment and  Thinking Out of the Box

Each of these qualities were deliberated upon at length with the trainers deploying several exercises, games, videos and other engagement tools to drive home the various points. The choice of videos and some of the unique games brought out by the facilitators became an instant hit amongst the students and they just couldn’t have enough of it!

THE REALITY FOR THE MILLENIALS:
The next segment of the workshop was a very special and an extremely important one. Chosen specifically by the trainers for the young audience, this segment dealt with how the pre-careers
world and the career world are so starkly different for the millennial generation kids and how they can prepare themselves for the upcoming reality. In this segment, the trainers attracted the attention of the young crowd towards four basic phenomenon of their growing up, which have not gone very well for this generation. This phenomenon included:
 Highly protected parenting  Psyche for instant gratification developed due to the Amazon age  Inability to build meaningful relationships in the age of fake friendships on Facebook  Misplaced sense of self worth

This part of the workshop touched a chord with each and every student attending the session because most of the things brought out here could be related to by most of them.

PERSONALITY & IMAGE:
The next part of the workshop was on personality and image. The trainers explained to the students the significance of image and persona in one’s life and how and what constitutes someone’s image in the society. The next part covered in this session was on Communication Skills. Talking about the role of Vocal and Visual elements of Communication the trainers engaged the students in a series of exercises and activities which helped them understand the nuances of Communication Skills. A special piece was done about body language with physical demonstrations in order to help the students understand, how to conduct themselves in public.

TEAMS:
The final segment of the workshop was designed around Teams. Since it was observed that working in teams is going to be an integral part of any career which the student choose, hence the trainers decided to orient the students towards the functions and dysfunctions of a team, the stages through which a team passes before it reaches its peak performance and how teams make it possible for each member to achieve more than what they can individually achieve. This segment and with this the workshop was concluded with an amazing exercise where the trainers proved to the students the real power of teams by demonstrating how four students could actually achieve supportless levitation because of teamwork.

Overall it was a memorable experience for the students. They not only had a lot of fun, but also went back much more serious and awakened towards their choices and careers. The workshop was successful in bringing forth both, lots of moments of joy as well as some moments of deep introspection for the students which made this workshop a roller coaster kind of an emotional experience for them. With lots of selfie moments and Facebook friends requests, the students finally let the trainers leave only once they had taken the trainers’ commitment to come back more frequently and help them groom further in their lives. We are sure that this association of The Last Mile with students of Ambalika would grow into a more long term and meaningful relation directed towards the overall development of the students of the institute.