Week 1 - Receiving Challenge Statement & Formation of Group

Receiving Challenge Statement

There were 8 initial challenge statements that was given to us, ranging from Fail-Safe Fund Transfer Experience to Digitization, Helping the FnB Little Guys. From the 8 different challenge statements that was given to us, I found that the challenge statement of helping the FnB Little Guys and mental health were 2 of the topics that I was very interested in.

For me, I was both excited and concerned about choosing the challenge statement on the day itself. First of all, I was excited because I had already discussed with my friends that we would form a group for the mental health challenge statement. Since we are more comfortable with each other, I felt that having them in my group would be much better than forming a new group with others. At the same time, I was also concerned about being able to make it into the top 24 places for the challenge statement, since there was a limit for each different challenge statements.

When we joined the call, there were over 30 people in the call for the challenge statement, which means that there would be a few people who would not be able to make it into the top 24 for the challenge statement. When we were required to fill in the form, I was one of the first to scan the QR code, but I realised that I was not logged in to my school account and therefore I was not able to fill in the form. In the end, by the time I was logged into my account, I was already late and was out of the top 24, meaning that I had to choose a different challenge statement. Because of this, I had to switch to my second desired challenge statement, which was Helping FnB.

Formation of Group

The group formation activity was designed such that those who gave the best ideas would be the group leader, and they would need to choose their own team members anonymously. In my opinion, this was a pretty good activity as it displays the people who would voice out their opinions, and this could identify them as potential leaders. I was picked by Jordan, who was the leader and I was quite happy with the group because the idea that I was thinking of was very similar to his. If we have similar ideas, it would be much easier to work towards one direction. After the formation of the group, Jordan initiated the conversation by asking us to introduce ourselves, and from there we started to understand and learn more about each other. We also assigned roles and I became one of the developers for the project.