Inspiration, Motivation and Dedication

Aparna Bhasin

Week 7 of the fellowship began with us having the opportunity to meet Aparna Bhasin, who is the founder and director of Aparna Bhasin Education Consulting. Her enthusiastic and innovative team provides strategic guidance and support service to not-for-profit organizations, foundations, education institutions and CSR campaigns in education. Her company’s end goal is to maximize impact. She has also helped to create the curriculum of Enterprise. She had an interesting education. She started her schooling in Mumbai and then moved to Mauritius.  she went on to complete her Bachelors from United World College(UWC) in Wales. During her education at UWC, she met around 300 students from 95 different countries.

After graduating, Aparna moved to Colombia University to pursue her Master’s degree in MSW Policy Administration and International Social Welfare.  She has worked on many projects away from her hometown out of her comfort zone. Taking up a project in the Midwest of the United States and also the backward neighborhood in Miami. As she was talking, we realized that she had never restricted herself to the education she got. She kept doing things that she loved & she found that she is contributing a lot to society . This made me realise that doing things not only helps us to understand what to do but also gives us ideas about what not to do. From her work experience, we realized the importance of working while studying.

Thereafter, we had a Diwali break during which we did a small Diwali Pooja at the Enterprise Space. We were so excited as this was the first time we had our own office and we wanted it to always have a positive vibe.

Product Discussion & Backlog

We got into action after the Diwali break. Since, we were manufacturing and selling the catapult toy, we got some reviews from  buyers and realised that there were some defects in the product. We sat together and tried to discuss the flaws of the product. We tried to fix them and hence created a product backlog sheet. As we were discussing, we understood that we hadn’t really used our own product. We started playing with our product to understand the defects better this was an eye-opening experience. We also got to know how pricing plays a crucial role. Pricing of a product is a very essential driver. The positioning of a product in a market totally depends on the price at which it is sold. We realised that,  a  small hike in the price of a product can result in higher profitability of the product without hurting the consumer’s pocket too much.

Spreadsheet Workshop

On the 15th of Nov, we had a spreadsheet workshop. In the beginning of the spreadsheets workshop, Adi told us that the most important thing he learnt at IIM-Ahmedabad during his M.B.A . was the power of MS-Excel. He is so good at Excel that he knows it at his fingertips and could used it for a variety of applications. We started the workshop from basics and learnt important functions such as Max, Sum, Vlookup etc. We also learnt how to fix columns and rows through some examples. We understood that spreadsheets are an essential tool for business not only for accounting but also the primary purpose is to organise and categorize the data into a logical format. We were lucky to have hands-on experience with an expert like Adi.

Baccha Party & January Event Discussion

On that Sunday, the 18th of Nov, we organised the “Baccha Party” event for user research and promotion of our product. We had 3 catapult games, 2 tangram, and choco-laddoos. The insights we learnt from the event was that our product was working very well and all the children were hooked on to the games and had a lot of fun playing with it.

So moving on baccha party event  , we started planning a new event. We researched on a couple of big events such as Insomnia, Burning Man festival and a festival , which was called the Adventure Thorn event and was held in Pune. We also spoke about an event called GEEK. The best part about this event was that it had been started by a woman whose son was addicted to gaming. Many people had told her that her son should stop gaming and start doing creative things. But she looked at the benefits of gaming and realised that it led to enhanced Critical-thinking capabilities, goal setting abilities and creativity. And then she started “GEEK”, a mega event which is now held across the world in big cities like Singapore, London, Sydney, New York.

So taking  the inspiration from this we decided to make people play with each other and have fun and also create bonding between the old generation and young generation.

[blockquote text=” The dream begins with the teacher who believes in you, who, who tugs and pushes and leads you to next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called ”truth”. But when you disappoint or fail him it is a big mistake you do. -Dan Rather ” text_color=”” width=”” line_height=”undefined” background_color=”” border_color=”” show_quote_icon=”yes” quote_icon_color=”#4285F4″]

Insincerity

After the January discussion, our mentor Aditya and Yusuf told us to make a presentation for the event about the activities, budget, and sponsors. We got laid back and didn’t meet any of our deadlines nor communicated, Adi was lenient for the first 2 months and ignored our mistakes but this time we thought he won’t say anything and we didn’t make the PPTs. The next day at 6am we got a message saying “Meeting cancelled”.

    And it was a shock! We were all clueless. We thought of various ways to cover it up, like writing messages. But the partners thought that let’s take this as an opportunity and take the responsibility to conduct the session. We decided our own agenda & conducted the entire session in which we discussed the product backlog, set some deadlines and henceforth, the partners always took lead. And we also decided to do willpower drive for  one month that may be anything such as no sweet food, going to the gym or not playing mobile games for a month . and thus we wrote our will power drive and recorded the will power drive.

 

[blockquote text=”The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand. – Vince Lombardi ” text_color=”” width=”” line_height=”undefined” background_color=”” border_color=”” show_quote_icon=”yes” quote_icon_color=”#4285F4″]