Introduction
Through the experience of the first two weeks of flying start leadership programme, I was given a wide range of activities, workshops and information sessions to get confidence, cultural awareness and skills to develop my approach to academic writing and study skills. This essay starts with a description of personal learning experience by chosen two impression courses or activities taken, followed by a personal improvement after the whole programme, leading to a final conclusion.
Pre- flying start programme
Prior to arriving to University of Stirling, one of the many reasons that I choose to study at University of Stirling is that upon graduation, the university committed to student employability. Statistics shows that more than 90% graduated students go onto work or continue education within 6 months (University of Stirling, 2014). This university is widely admired for its innovation and excellence (University Guide, 2014).
I resigned from work just two days before coming to university without any further career plan, because I am tired on working overtime. I want to join a university to learn how to work smarter not harder.
Personal learning experience
In my opinion, I think that the flying start programme was designed purposely for students who need to be prepared to learn prior to the commerce of the courses.
1.1 Learning experience from Business Challenge
This class started based on assumption of a cake manufactory trading. There are five representative departments in each manufactory. Thus, we need to find a cake operator, production department manager, purchase department manager, sales manager and project director. In an open trading market, the sole cake consume customer will release 25 orders to world widely suppliers, each order will be closed in 15 minutes to 1 hour according to game designer set in advance. The cake colour, purchase price, quantity and time limitation will be given once the order was released. Each cake manufactory had an initial capital of 100 pounds for cake material acquirement. A further loan with 10% interest would be applied accordingly. All relevant cake materials were supplied by one large local company, and material price would be changed based on actual market demand.
I consider this scenario of manufactory trading assumption to be fairly simple compared to real work environment outside, but if we want to make a success, we still need to learn how to make efficiency work with different department colleagues. Firstly, all of five students in our team came from different countries, we had different culture and understanding about this game before we start. My choice is to act as a cake operator, because I do think I can make good time management on producing cake once the purchase manager get enough materials. Also I do not need pay attention on other things like money control, communication with other group members to decide which order should be taken, or negotiation with supplier and customer about the price given. Then we start to play without any more discussion about the game rules or department accountabilities. Of course, we missed the first two orders, because the purchase manager do not really understand the whole game rules. I do not believe that I can produce a cake if this girl do not buy any material. So I tried to explain her the game rules because I record them on my note book. On the other hand, I had work experience in manufactory industry. Maybe I am a little bit quicker to understand the game procedures than those students who never have any work experience before. The third order from customer was a simple cake with several materials, then we quickly take the chance to make cake after group discussion, but still make mistake, material were bought more than enough due to lack of calculation. But I do not think it was my responsibilities because I am a cake operator right now. Subsequently, I realized that we are now working as a team, we will