Office Hours with Rethink

Office Hours:

Office Hours is a platform which facilitates one-on-one online meetings between a curated set of professionals and students/early career professionals. The participants are the ones that are part of Rethink’s learning collective while the professionals are selected on both willingness & ability to contribute.

Schedule:

Office hours are scheduled on the third Thursday of every month where the professionals interact with the participants over a video call for one hour between 7 to 9 pm. Ideally, a professional engages in two 20 mins conversations with two learners in the one hour he/she looks to keep aside as contribution to Rethink. Thursday is chosen as a suitable day considering the factor that weekends are quality time spend with family. The time frame is chosen appropriately acknowledging the fact that most of our participants are college going students.

We look to have this conversation done as a video call because it is easy to make the conversation happen at any point in time. Also, we could stick to the time frame of 20 minutes without any travel or energy overheads.

Other reasons for video call:

1. To avoid sharing of personal contact numbers. There have been instances where professionals are not comfortable with sharing their personal contact numbers with students. In order to follow a generalised system, we have resorted video calls.
2. We have found a general trend of students pinging professionals elsewhere when they have access to their contact numbers. Hence to respect the time of the professionals, we resort to video calling as a means.

And where do these video calls happen? Appear. Appear is an easy to use video calling platform that we discovered where you can get on any video call just with a click of a link. This is the reason why we prefer Appear instead of Hangouts or any other video calling platform.

Why Office Hours?

Good healthy universities have a system where students get the opportunity to interact with their alumni. Rethink decided to organise Office Hours to bridge that gap in colleges in Kerala.

During this 20 minute session, the student's interaction with these professionals will give them a sense of what the professional world looks like. The professionals would just have to share their experience and insights from scenarios where they made important decisions along their career path and their motivation to do so.

My personal interest in setting up Office Hours:

I am presently overseeing the setting up of office hours property as part of my voluntary efforts with Rethink. My personal motivation to commit is as follows:

1. Building a meaningful relationship with professionals.
2. Learning how to interact with them.
3. Good emailing practice.
4. A comfortable work atmosphere where I am given the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them.
5. Direct guidance from SKG, Jibin Jose and much more, that I am yet to discover.