The average day in the life of an engineering student can be very tiring. Striking the perfect balance between academics, co-curricular activities and personal physical and mental health is a very difficult job, until and unless one has a natural gift in any of these domains which is a very rare thing to have. This could even become an even more difficult task for a student in a place like MIT, Manipal, where the time given to these clubs and projects is given as much importance as the time devoted to academics. All sorts of problems related to time management, personal health maintenance, proper and adequate focus towards work and social relationships may arise. This isn’t something which many of us see as a big problem in our lives, and even many of us do this act of balancing in a very efficient manner, but sometimes the right kind of guidance can go a long way into making this process, even more, smoother for everyone and anyone.
Another average example of this whole scenario was my day to day activities up until a couple weeks earlier, not that I wasn’t going anywhere with my work but the similar problems arose in my life as well, the lack of focus, the constant worrying about how to plan the coming week etc. One day I heard of this program called the Youth Empowerment and Skills workshop (also known as YES!+ workshop) which was going to be held in like 15 days time and I got to know of it through a team of students who were promoting this event inside our college and claimed to have been a part of this workshop, and were now reaping its benefits. Out of my willingness to get rid of the problems I was having in my daily life, I signed up for it, only to realize that this whole 6-day programme is going to lie in between one of the busiest weeks as it was gonna have lots of club as well as academic work. Still worrying about the whole scenario in front of me, I walked into the first day of the workshop, a room full of 30 new faces, and sat down to see what it was that I had got myself into. Surprisingly, at the end of the three hours of the first day, a long time which just flew by, I felt a significant amount of change already in the way that my mind was functioning. The number of activities which happened during the first day, which included yoga and many philosophical and inspirational talks embedded in fun games, already were showing their effect. Also, the first most important lesson I learned was that of commitment, as now I had to commit the same duration of 3 hours for the next 5 days, no matter how tiring my whole day had been or whatever stuff I had planned for the evening.
After this important lesson of committing to a cause, came many more. Now, these are stuff almost everyone has heard of and even tried to follow a few of them, but the way the same lessons were given as blended in what we experience daily, really made a lasting impression on the mind. The way it was shared amongst the participants of the workshop, and the way these were attached with the notions and techniques of keeping a healthy body and mind made it even more appealing to the brain. The best thing which I was seeing for the first time in me was the kind of interaction I was having with the other people in the workshop. These were all people of similar domains, living the same student life even though in different aspects and time periods of it, still on a normal day I wouldn’t take this liberty to talk to even one of them as they would all seem strange to me. The breaking of this barrier I have with new people is also something that was really eye-opening. Never before had I interacted so fluently with so many new and different people.
In what was to be the busiest week ever in my student life, turned out into a really fun and perception changing one. Even though I was tired by the end of every day, but my mind was relaxed than before. All that experience is also helping me now as that ever- lingering worry for the coming day or week has subsided. Another big proof of that is the very fact that I wrote this long article in the week when the exams are to take place! The YES!+ workshop is a necessary experience for students like us to have at least once during our time of studies in our courses.
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