KHAWAB…
When we go into the core of the lifestyle of society today, often we get a different picture altogether about education. The actual concept of education must be a real one that makes every child unique Which creates enthusiasm that inspires that child to learn more about life. Today’s education seeks to total development of the young generation. It’s duty of every individual to help to fulfill this gap by transferring knowledge and providing understanding to other young students. Here in Pakistan, we analyze the gap that many students get confused about, which subjects they should choose and what career is best suited for them.
Career is like a business and you are the CEO. What you do today in this business will define where you will go tomorrow. But career counselling is a crucial process in which we have to work. We are living in Pakistan, where the maximum of the students is unaware of their cause of study. They do not understand what to do after graduation? What is their passion? What field should they choose? How to become a good student? How to decide a better career for them? What is the study process and what the important factor other than academics which plays an important role in their future life?
The majority of students do not know their potential, they don’t know whether they like the profession they choose and if they do not enter what they chose; they get confused about what to do next and hence, a vague career path. There are about 445,000 university graduates in Pakistan every year and out of these 445,000 graduates only 115,750 (26%) are working in their respective fields they graduated from, while the other 74% isn’t working in other fields they graduated. The only reason behind this is the wrong subject selections at the intermediate level. Further out of this 74%, 48% of the students do not find interest in their fields and others didn’t find the Job. The main reason for this is the lack of knowledge of the field they want to pursue. Our nation is mentally in slumbers. We have thousands of Engineers but we still need a foreign Engineer to install our machine. Students secured 90% marks in their matric but failed in the future because of a lack of field selection. This disaster leads to unemployment, stress, quit from studies and stops country development.
We, 6 circle members, decided that we will
“Identify the gap between education and career counselling for a head start towards the future”.
More of the time career choices are being made under family pressure, by keeping in view of trends of the society and lack of proper knowledge and guidelines. As a result, lack of interest of students in their career leads to mediocre approach towards the attainment of the goals and life. These prevailing conditions motivated us to step forward to help students in finding out what kind of career choices can help them invest their limitless potential wholeheartedly in a direction which will lead towards developed minds and a better future.
“True guidance is like a small torch in a dark forest. It doesn’t show everything once. But it gives enough light for the next step to be safe.”
We decided the name ‘KHAWAB’ which means ‘dream’. We will help students like us by helping them in achieving their dreams. We will tell them how to achieve your dreams. What are the mistakes we made, and what did we learn, and how can they use our learning and become successful?
“Walking on a road without seeing and planning for what’s down the road will catch you off-guard and maybe a harsh blow, some time or other.”
― Abhishek Ratna.
Objectives which we want to achieve;
Channelized the problem faced by students in career selection and career building.
Less confident or confused in selecting subjects or career.
Help them in identifying what they like to do in their career
Listing down the alternative career opportunities for them if they ever get confused in their career path
Improve students’ achievements through the quality of instruction
Lead then the way to achieve their goals and objectives
Promote self-growth and instructional effectiveness
Help the students identify their potential
To accomplish our motto of unleashing the true potential, we have assigned duties according to the skills and capabilities of our circle members. First, we decide that we will hit the matriculation students and provide them with career counseling. Besides which we will motivate them towards hard work and give them a brief introduction to stop procrastination and being productive. We divided the tasks equally and started working on it.
The first step was to make a handout proposal and try to reach every school possible and ask them for permission for a session.
The second step was to make our social media accounts which include Facebook page, Instagram account, YouTube account, Twitter account, LinkedIn account, medium account and also one website. Through all these channels we will provide proper guidelines to the students regarding their future goals and their career choices.
The third step was to make presentations on these topics for our class sessions. But before that, we need a proper content and material using which we can help students. This task was assigned to all equally and one person was assigned to compile all the data and make a presentation. Lastly to take the feedback from the students.
Counselling will be divided into different segments. Such as motivational speaking, guidance for future, awareness of constructed fields and maybe some funny but constructive activity. I will work on Motivational section and similarly, other segments are divided in everyone.
“Whatever you do, make sure it makes you Happy.”
It was an arduous and challenging moment for us to make a start and search out schools with their permission. We had a lot of problems like as:
1-We all are busy in university life, assignments and projects. So, It was very difficult to manage our time and prepare the quality material for counselling and also how to present it and make it interesting.
2-Schools have too much concern with their academic activities and they show no interest in our initiative. It was a challenge to manipulate them for counselling. Me and Nabeel visited almost 26 schools in one day, shared our plans with them and ask for a 1-Hour session but because of the test session, only 4 schools allowed us. Further, they didn’t put so much interest in career counselling as we aren’t from any specific organisation. We choose other things to add in our presentations and try to narrow down our scales to exactly what they actually need. We put exam techniques, fast ways of learning, how to be productive in exam sessions and some activities to show students what exactly happens when they don’t follow the right guidelines.
3- Date and timing was a major factor, we were from different places and have to manage a common day for all to gather for counselling. Also, the time school gave us contradict somehow with the few genuine reasons for our circle members. Even it becomes difficult to have meetups and do the planning. But somehow we sit till late for a couple of days and completed almost all the stuff.
4- Just only delivering a lecture was the boring and old method, we added creativity to make students do some constructive assessments and I took a long time to decide assessment and practice it.
5- One of the major problems was Smog issues. In the second week of the mega-project, after a lot of struggles, we found two sessions, one in Allied School and other in Lahore lyceum but because of smog and offs on Friday and Saturday, we missed the sessions and they didn’t give us session again. In the next session again we visited a lot of schools. We almost dropped our proposal in 20+ schools and again we found 3 schools but Smog again spoiled everything and we were so disappointed. But we didn’t lose hope and still try to find some session and Alhamdulillah we have one session tomorrow in Allied School Bisma Campus and one on Friday in Punjab School System.
6- Then the date of mega-project blog one came, and a conflict started in our circle regarding Leadership. We listen to each other and resolved the matter by changing the Leader after voting. But we wasted a lot of time in this.
7- One problem we face that is we all are business students and two from sciences but we don’t have any member from computer sciences field, so we are facing a lot of issues regarding the website and social media handling.
“There will be obstacles. There will be doubters. There will be Mistakes. But with Hard Work, there is no limit“.
We faced a lot of challenges in the first three weeks but we achieved a lot of things. Our Social media campaign was running at a very good pace that we have almost 700 followers on the facebook page of KHAWAB and 300 on Instagram. Through our visit to almost 30+ schools, we came to know the original demands of the student and school. What they actually want from us and how can we get a session. From the very first school to the last we visited until now, we keep on changing the strategies and get to know more and more about the market. We made the final presentations and compile all the data required for the sessions. We are prepared for the sessions and going to have 2 sessions this week. Further, a strong relation build between the team members and the efficiency of work is increasing day by day.
Talking about the final thing that is our future plans. We are working really hard to get more and more sessions in schools. We have a target of 10+ big schools in Lahore, even outside of the Lahore, our few members dropped the handout of our proposal in Vehari and Okara and people there also find the need of these things. Our focus in the next two weeks is to make the original content for our website. We are also working on making small videos regarding career counselling, being productive, how to know yourself and much more content for our YouTube channel. For, all these things we will arrange a mega-event that is a bonfire in Amal Academy for the fundraising for the running of the project. I will end this with our slogan,
“Parho Pakistan, Kuch Bano Pakistan.”
