Aesp Personal Reflection

AESP Personal Reflection

The AESP project not only just is my first project carrying out in the society, it is also a unique experience where joy and demanding workload comes together, just like tasting a cup of coffee. The major enjoyment of this project is undoubted to have new and close friends, while the most difficult part is to carry out the project in the reality, not just on the paper and theoretically.

When I first came across the groupmates, to a certain extent, I thought I was very likely to carry out the project on my own as one of my groupmate is an international student and the others are the executive committee of a society, who have a demanding workload. Moreover, because of my “social phobia”, I never thought of my groupmate would become the most valued new-found friends in UST. At the initial stage, where we were required to brainstorm and found potential organizations to cooperate, I was the one who contributed the most, coming with the most theoretically feasible and best project idea and thinking of ways to achieve that. This lured me to fall into the trap of overestimating my ability and being too self-centered, which causes me not to value my groupmates opinion as much as mine. I neglected some doubts and oppositions from my groupmates, “we” (or I) agree on promoting environmentally friendly to restaurants. This was the start of the journey, the occurrence of endless failures and valuable friendship.

Around on the second week, we decided to meet at Kowloon City in the early meaning to find potential restaurants who are willing to carry out our environmentally friendly project that is to provide incentives to invite customers to bring their own lunchboxes for takeaway. When we met, there was an unexpected rainfall, marking as the start of the failure and tears of setbacks. After several hours, we failed to find one and recognized the project was too ideal to carry out. At the moment, I was super depressed and kept blaming myself for wasting my groupmates’ time as they took lots of time traveling. I never expected failures in this group project as I experienced no failures in my past experience. My groupmates seemed to notice my sadness. They indeed sent me lengthy WhatsApp messages as they thought banning my idea would make me feel upset. Their warmth and caring were the first time I experienced in UST!! I was moved and touched, and this is how our friendship ignited.

However, things were at no time that smooth. No matter how many ideas we came up, we still could not successfully carry it out. We had made several attempts during the following five weeks. Observing other groups doing it smoothly, we started to become impatient, leading to some disputes.

Despite numerous disputes, we nevertheless have a true friendship as we knew that we argued as we all care the project so much. We apologized to each other in various ways: verbally, non-verbally and even buying Starbucks for others. I was totally moved about that.