A Journey of 365 Days — How Excel is Already Changing My Life
— By Eduardo Lew, Excel 2018
Just about a year ago, I was boarding an airplane to fly into what was about to become one of the greatest experiences of my life. I was very excited about the trip… I mean, who wouldn’t be? The idea of living in Tel Aviv for 10 weeks, meeting a lot of incredibly smart and fun people from the top schools of the US, Canada, Mexico and and Israelis my age from the most elite units of the IDF, having my first professional experience working for a great company, meeting leaders and very successful people in a lot of different aspects, I just thought to myself –“This just can’t get any better,” but wow was I wrong. My experience with Birthright Israel Excel, and its amazing community, just keeps getting better every day.
My 2018 summer was probably the best summer of my life. Every single day of it was amazing, but that was only the beginning… the tip of the iceberg some might say. I knew that the program had a “lifelong fellowship” once the summer was over, but I had no idea how incredible that part of the Excel community was going to be. I’m writing this article on June 5th, 2019, exactly one year after I arrived in Israel, and I still can’t believe how much this program has given me already.
I had a video chat with my amazing Israeli peer 3 days ago, tomorrow I’m meeting a friend from my Excel cohort who is visiting Mexico, I became very close to incredible people here in Mexico City who I didn’t even know before, I had the opportunity to travel to NYC. for the Annual Excel Summit, to San Francisco for our first ever City Captain retreat, had a very good friend of mine that I made during the summer stay at my house for a couple of days while I stayed at his in LA a couple of months later, had Excel’s support and sponsorship to attend Ciudad de Las Ideas event, had their support to host a mind-blowing Public Speaking workshop with a TEDx-Speaker a couple of days ago, and the list keeps going on..
So how did all of this happen? I’d love to share with you the story of how after only one year, Birthright Israel Excel has already changed my life forever… It’s hard to put all of that in a 10-minute read, but I’ll try to do my best.
My Summer Experience
How it all started… I’m not going to lie, it was a difficult process to even get accepted. I knew it was going to take a long time and also that not a lot of people would get in. I had to go through a lot of new and challenging things personally, because to be honest, here in Mexico City we don’t have the same “internship” culture as they do in the US, and before Excel I didn’t have any similar experience with such a demanding application process. It was tough for me to decide whether to apply or not because that meant leaving other opportunities aside, in order to compete against thousands of very talented applicants. After sitting for an entire day working on my CV, taking 200 video shots to get my application just right, receiving that email after every phase while going through two really tough interviews, today I can tell you that applying to this program was one of the best decisions that I’ve ever made.
The people
You can’t have an amazing experience without amazing people. I spent 10 weeks with an incredible group of 53 people from North America (1 from Mexico, 3 from Canada, and the rest from the US). It was great to spend this entire time with them, every conversation that I had was meaningful no matter who it was with, and I made a lot of very good friends that I’m sure are going to last a lifetime.
Israeli Peers — My Peer
A great thing about the program is that it is not only about spending time with peers from North America, there was also a group of 54 Israelis that where all matched with us as what Excel claimed to be “our Israeli clone”. All of them were amazing, but mine was definitely the best. Excel made an incredible effort while trying to make the perfect match, and at least with me they did it successfully. His name is Eddie Dovzhik (we even have the same name) and he is one of the best people I know. We became very close to each other, we went to a lot of bars to watch the World Cup games, I went to have dinner at his house and meet his family, and we’ve managed to stay in contact having a video call every month.
Living in Tel Aviv for 10 weeks
Not only did I spend 10 weeks with amazing people, I did it while living in one of my favorite cities in the world, Tel Aviv. It is such a fun place to be, there are so many things to do that I just couldn’t believe it. It was a very demanding summer in terms of my job as a Research Assistant at General Motors Advanced Technical Center in Herzliya, and the lectures that we had, but it was also very fun. We went out almost every night to a lot of clubs and bars, I ate delicious food, spent time at the beach, played volleyball and traveled around the country.
My Internship
I had the opportunity to work at General Motors R&D center in Israel at the Vehicle Controls team, a dream job to me. Before this experience I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pursue a career related to engineering or if I wanted to switch into business, but after those 10 weeks I was certain that I wanted to go for engineering. After working there, I just couldn’t picture myself doing something different. Every single day I got up with a huge smile on my face, very excited to go to the office. This wasn’t only related to what I did (which was incredible) but to the amazing people that I was lucky to work with. The people that work there are some of the smartest people that I’ve ever been with, and I learned a lot from all of them. I learned a lot about leadership from the group-lead Alon Capua, a lot of new things from all the team members (I still talk to Lior Falach about 3D printing) but my mentor, Sharon Hornstein was the best. I learned a lot from her and we made a great team, we accomplished so many things during those 10 weeks that it seemed like we worked together for months. I also got the chance to meet her family once she invited me to have dinner at her home, one if the best meals of my summer.
Success Stories/Lectures from Leaders
One of my favorite parts of the summer was having lectures with very successful people two or three times a week. Every week we had the chance to meet leaders from a lot of different aspects and listen to their stories, which was amazing because I learned a lot from it. I had the chance to listen to Adi Soffer Teeni (CEO, Facebook Israel), Assaf Rappaport (GM, Microsoft Israel R&D Center), Gil Shwed (Founder & CEO, Checkpoint), and Avi Issacharoff (Co-Creator of Fauda and Middle East analyst) forexample, among many others, people that I would’ve never been able to meet if it wasn’t for Excel.
The Lifelong Fellowship — Post Summer
The summer was amazing, but my experience after it has been even better. Once the summer was done we were told of all the things that we would be able to do as part of the community, in that moment I couldn’t believe (and today I still can’t) how many amazing things this program had to offer. I’ll talk about my experience with both the entire Excel community and my local Excel community here in Mexico City.
Excel’s Entire Community
Excel offers a lot of great things, but the best of it is definitely the network that I became a part of. Belonging to an elite group of almost 700 people that increases by 100+ every year added a lot of value to my life. During this year I’ve been able to do a lot of things thanks to Excel’s community:
- EXCELERATE18, the Annual Leadership Summit in NYC: I was able to attend the summit in November where I got the chance to meet people from other cohorts, listen to great speakers and enjoy seeing all of my friends from the summer. I am very excited to have the opportunity to attend this summit every year and hoping not to miss any of them.
- City Captain retreat: One of Excel’s initiatives is having city captains in most of the cities that have people belonging to the fellowship. This in order to have a point of contact in each city and encourage the local communities to stay active and take advantage of Excel’s resources. Once I heard about this initiative I got very excited and became the city captain of Mexico City, my home. I wanted to stay involved with Excel as much as possible and give back to my local community while taking advantage of the resources that the program had to offer. Thanks to this, I had the opportunity to travel to San Francisco earlier this year for our first ever city captain’s retreat where I was able to spend a couple of days talking with other city captains of how we could use Excel’s resources the best way possible. It’s been an incredible experience and definitely something that I’d love to keep doing for a long time.
My Local Community
Our community is not very big yet, but it is definitely amazing. We are 5 people right now waiting for two more from the 2019 cohort who are now in Israel to come home; it is not a big number, but it is certainly more about quality than quantity. All of the fellows that belong to this community are awesome and I’m very happy that I’ve had the chance to become close to them. It’s been a great year for our community, we’ve been able to have dinners together, catch up with our lives, and done a lot of very interesting things throughout the year:
- Recruiting event: Once I came back we hosted a recruiting event with the intention of having a bigger quantity of applicants than the previous year in order to have more than two people going per year and make our community grow faster. It was great to talk about our experience and we managed to bring a speaker that founded his own company and listen to his success story.
- Ciudad de las Ideas: In November from that same year Excel helped me and another fellow to go to an event called Ciudad De Las Ideas (in Puebla, Mexico) where we were able to listen to a lot of speakers, learn a lot of things and make important connections for the entire Excel community.
- Public Speaking Workshop: During the city captains retreat one of the goals that we set was to serve not only our local Excel community, but also the external community and that is how this workshop idea became a reality. Every time I got together with my local community we talked about things that we were interested in or that we would love to learn, and we all agreed that public speaking was a skill that we all wanted to dominate. This is how, with the help of Excel the past month we were able to host a Public Speaking workshop for 15 people that was mind-blowing. We managed to find a very well-prepared facilitator with a lot of experience and the result was amazing. I could talk about how great this experience was but I’m going to let some of the participants opinions talk for themselves:
o “Arie didn’t only give me the basic tools and tips for public speaking, he also showed me how to formulate my conversations in order for them to be more interesting and appealing to any speaker” — Jaime Laniado (Excel, 2019)
o “The Public Speaking workshop made it clear to me that it is necessary to be a facilitator of the topic, not an expert. That is, to speak before an audience is simply to guide them through history, not to educate them. Most importantly, the workshop showed me that I have partners that are moved by creating an impact in the world. That is what we need the most today: initiative, passion and vision of a better future. Through these workshops we can make that vision a reality, thanks to the fact that it interacts with memorable people.” — Alex Levy (friend of an Excel Fellow)
o “It was a great experience in general, a good opportunity to learn the theory of public speaking and practice what we learned on the spot. I think that a systematic approach to such an important soft skill is essential and convenient.” — Daniel Bronsoiler (Excel Fellow, 2017)
o “For me, the public speaking workshop was a great experience to get to know myself better and learn about skills that one can develop when speaking in public with the objective of improving one’s speech and winning the audience over.” — Miriam Jassan (My amazing girlfriend J)
o “Public Speaking is one of the most important skills that a person in any field can have. Learning it from Arie and everyone that was in the workshop was truly inspiring because we all had something different that we could bring to the table. One of the things that stuck out for me the most was Arie saying that if you want to achieve something you have to “show up” and raise your hand. I have no doubt that I will be applying everything I learned in future job interviews, presentations and conferences.” — Nancy Edid (Excel Fellow, 2018)
o “As the workshop’s facilitator it was motivating to see the group’s dedication during the different exercises as well as the detailed feedback the participants provided to each other. It inspires me to see young leaders and entrepreneurs, such as the members of Excel chapter in Mexico City, to continue their training to become stronger communicators in their fields”
– Arie Schwartzman (Business and Life Strategist, and Workshop Facilitator) @ariejsf
As you can tell, Birthright Israel Excel has become a major part of my life, and it’s only been one year since I boarded the flight to Israel. I’ve made lifelong friends, determined my career path, and have taken leadership opportunities (and even created some) that will last a lifetime. I look forward to hearing about this summer’s cohort of Fellows and welcoming all 108 of them into our ever-expanding community of emerging Jewish leaders in August.
Eduardo Lew is a senior currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in Mechatronics Engineering at Tecnólogico de Monterrey in Mexico City. He is part of the 2018 cohort of Birthright Israel Excel’s amazing community where he hasthe honor of being the City Captain of Mexico City. It’s been a year now since I am part of the program, and I couldn’t be more satisfied, happy and proud to belong to Excel.
