Haha, I thought TAing MEMSI would be a walk in the park,
but heck was I wrong. Mad props to Kate, JebJeb, and Jake for being my awesome TAs and making my first MEMSI experience awesome. Writing this at 4am Friday (a day before showcase day), I don’t think I ever stayed up this late for work during my MEMSI (closest rival was when I went to get food at 4:30am after our last night out at LKF; shoutout to Matt, Kat, and JebJeb).
When I was participating in MEMSI, I put everything out there, for my team and our product. Quite honestly, I didn’t have much energy left to care much about other teams, let alone help them. I also worked a lot harder for a longer period of time, so I played harder as well. If my short-term memory serves me correct, I went out six nights during the intensive two week bootcamp. In addition, I had very little personal time. Although I wanted to visit my aunt who lives in HK, I didn’t get to see her until the day after MEMSI, an hour before I left the country.
The life of a TA is quite different. Now, the people that I am accountable to expanded to everyone involved with MEMSI. This includes all the TAs, staffs, and all 27 of the student participants. This redefined what success looked like for me. I can no longer be selfish and focus on just making my individual team successful, but every single person in MEMSI. To do this, the TAs self-organized to design several activities that brought the teams closer together, like building the tallest freestanding structure to support a baby Teletubby, pitch practice, morning SCRUM… But this was just the easy stuff. In order to really help teams progress, especially during the second week when everyone is aggregating their learnings from their PMR and narrowing their focus to work on a significant problem that matters to someone, I needed to better understand what they’re up to and get involved with each of them directly.
As suggested by our fearless leader, Elaine Chen, we should be very mindful of when a team actually needs help and “how much” we are helping. There is great value in ownership of the project and learning from both success and failure. As a result, it is important that we just touch the teams “lightly”. I started checking in with the teams once in the morning, and at least once more later in the day, and whenever I get the chance, chat with individual team members about their project with a casual tone. I really enjoyed not having to actively participate in one of the projects, because it allowed me to allocate all of my energy to the five projects and just serve as a guide as they reach certain checkpoints.
Some fun stuff. Before our day off, I had an awesome night of sleep prior because I stayed in like an old man while everyone else was out at LKF. Then during Sunday, I went to hike Dragons Back with Sal and Rahul, who were troopers because they went out the night before and came back super late. The hike was gorgeous and our team was a great crew. We saw really cool views in addition to seeing a man flying his RC plane at the peak (which we confused for a bird at first), a Pacific Ocean facing prison, and several good looking mansions with oversized pools. Additionally, the entirety of showcase day was eventful as usual: running A/V on showcase day was intense and fun, the spontaneous Karaoke party turned into a contagious forcefield that could not be stop, eating some of the best HK food with the locals at 品香楼, and ending with lit activities at LKF (quantified by 5 hours and 85HKD of cover fee).
All in all, I am really happy to have TA MEMSI this June (possibly the last june session) because I got to experience the TA side of the program and spend time with some very special people. The world really is as tiny as you want it to be and ain’t no mountain high enough.
……
Most recent update: On my last day in HK (today), 6/11/2018, I pulled an all nighter. Caught the 8:30a flight to leave HK 😞. Landed in Beijing 30 minutes late for my transfer to Tokyo. But since I slept like a pig on the flight (from moment I sat down), I actually didn’t know I was running late until this old lady ran into me and I was like “yo you okay?”. Then it was all rush hour after that… and I made it to the final boarding call luckily. Unfortunately, when I reached Haneda, I found out that my luggage wasn’t as quick as I was back in Beijing and got left behind as a result. I’m a bit bumped but my solo plans is still on schedule so all is well.
Signing off now. Going to be off the grid for the next few days. Will Wei Xun survive his solo trip across Japan. Stay tune.