Journey at Amal Academy
Amal Academy is a Stanford and PepsiCo funded academy in Lahore, Pakistan. It is a 3-month online program to develop professional skills needed for a successful career and life.
I came to know about Amal Academy from one of my class fellows who was doing fellowship last year. I saw clear changes in her personality. She became more interactive and confident. She also encourages me to apply for this opportunity. So I thought about utilizing the lockdown period and applied for fall session 2020–2021 and fortunately got selected among 7000 applicants.
These 3 months have become the best months in my life. From the orientation session to the last session, I enjoyed it. I am blessed enough to meet and learn from such positive and inspiring people like my program manager and facilitator. Besides them, my batch fellows were all amazing people. They are talented and goal-oriented.
Appreciation is the best thing about this fellowship. According to my thoughts, in Pakistan people do not appreciate you for the little good that you do even a big one. But at Amal, we were told to appreciate everyone from the very start. And everybody practiced it throughout the fellowship. This gives me positive energy. I feel motivated every time I receive appreciation. I am thankful to everyone who ever appreciates me in any way.
Moreover, I really like learning new terms and techniques. Pomodoro technique for time management is really new and helpful. Leadership without authority was another concept and inspired me to take lead and responsibility. I also liked the Amal principle of Khudi and Kam Kam Kam very much. Whenever I feel demotivated or under-confident I think about Khudi. And if I feel so low and there is so much work to do, I think about Kam Kam Kam, it really helps me to become motivated and I complete my work with positive energy.
Mega circle and megaproject is another part of this journey and it is really an incredible experience in my life. All my circle members are helpful, respectful, and talented. Such a nice team to work with. This helps me to improve my abilities to work in a team. Our megaproject is about collecting books and providing them to the children of unprivileged areas to enhance the culture of reading in Pakistan. We as a team were able to collect around 650 books in just one month. This is a huge success and I thoroughly enjoyed every step of this project. My favorite part was to see the smiles of children after getting the books. I hope our efforts will play a positive part in the lives of the children who will read these books.
I am feeling so happy that I am finally going to graduate from Amal soon. The hard work I put in this fellowship will finally be going to get the reward. And I am sure that it will help me throughout my professional and personal life. At last, my takeaways from this fellowship are to take lead, be yourself, just start, hard work, interview tips, the importance of teamwork, networking, gratitude, and mentorship. I am proud of myself for completing this and thankful to the incredible people who taught me so many things. An unforgettable experience indeed.
