Point To Point

What a tiring last few weeks I’ve had! No sooner had I finished exams than I was swept off up to London for a week’s work experience which, I might add, went really well. And then as soon as I finished work down at Vauxhall last Friday I was expected to get back on a bus down to Cheltenham for our end of work experience meeting. This meeting turned out to be a complete waste of time, or so my friends said… I didn’t go . However, I was still expected back on school premises the next day so I could go on a Foundation Course for two days. Now does that strike you as something I would particular like to do straight after my exams? No, is the answer, and I was fairly skeptical when we boarded the bus early on Sunday morning. I was only armed with the knowledge that I needed comfortable clothes, trainers and a waterproof.

I’m happy to say that as much as I hated the idea of going to some random place on a Sunday afternoon, the Foundation Course was excellent. It showed me a lot about myself as a person, and the sort of role I could fulfill in a team of working adults. And that role is…. leader. I’ve always had large dreams about running some multinational company, and I thought I had it within me to manage a team of talented people… well, I was one of the two people in my team who emerged as leaders, and I enjoyed the role thoroughly. But what of the course itself? Well, the two day course took place in the new Cotswold Conference Center, somewhere near Oxford. Owned by the famous entrepreneur Jorgen-Philip Sorensen, my school is the only one in the United Kingdom which has the privelege of using this world renowned business training centre (because Sorensen has relatives who go to Dean Close). After an eventful journey in which the bus overheated, we arrived at the conference center. On the way, there had been a incessant beeping which we couldn’t deduce the source of… there I was joking “It’s a bomb” a la Speed, but it turns out that beeping signals the bus is overweight and the engine is overheating.

Well, as soon as the 50 strong group of students arrived at the center, we were split into smaller groups of around 8, and each group was assigned a teacher: it was made clear that they would not be acting as a ‘teacher’ during the course, rather they would be reviewing us. The head of the camp also gave us the keys to our bedrooms, which she mentioned, were one-to-a-room and had en-suite bathrooms. This was a massive surprise to me- I was expecting 10 to a room accommodation with one shower between all those people. However, when I arrived at the room it was completely different to what I had imagined; there were LCD TV’s in each room, and really well outfitted, spacious rooms with new bathrooms.

After dropping my bags off, I returned to the main conference building, where my group would be meeting, in a room named Warwick. To cut things short, over the two days we were set 7 different tasks, after each of which we evaluated our performance as a team and what we would do to improve it. Each of the tasks tested different skills, from maths to presentation, but the overall aim was teamwork. In the end, the team I was a part of went on to win the final presentation task, earning ourselves £10 each and the opportunity to present our creation to the Dean Close Marketing Team. Not bad, eh?