It all started that one rainy day. It was a routine school day and I was in class keenly listening to my teacher explain a concept from a subject. She was suddenly interrupted by another teacher who I identified as one of our grade’s physics teachers. The teacher said something and both started scanning our class and students as though they were searching for someone. Suddenly their eyes stopped on me and my name was called out.
I pushed my desk in front, creating space for me to walk out. As I made my way to the door, I mentally ran through the possibilities of why my name could have been called out. I walked until I came face to face with the teacher. “You have been selected to represent our school at the Teenovators competition!” she said, with a smile on her face.
Who knew that day would be the start of a new learning experience for me and an end to my fear of public speaking and voicing my opinion. The following day I got to meet my team members. I recognised a few of them while some I had never seen or interacted with before. We all got together and gave in our inputs. Every point was better than the last, it was an amazing start to an amazing project. The very first day we had finalised our project and brainstormed on how we would proceed further.
In our team, we made sure that everyone’s voices were heard and everyone felt as important as any other team member. I sure did feel that way! I felt that my opinion was valued and always taken into consideration. Our project was ‘VeCro’ (Vertical Cropping) and I can say very proudly that I had come up with this acronym! It was a project that was not only innovative but had a huge social impact as it helped deal with various small problems that our agricultural sector (the backbone of India) faces.
We had finished working on our presentation and also a brief report about our project. We were soon ready to represent our school at the qualifying round. From there on, our project kept scaling new heights. We kept getting together and making the project better than it was on the previous day. What makes our team so unique is how all of us look at the same thing from such different perspectives. It helped improve our project in various ways.
All of us were eagerly waiting for the day the list of finalists would be announced. We got selected! Our team is now one of the finalists out of 100+ teams that sent their entries, to represent Chennai at Manipal University. Now we are all set and eagerly looking forward to presenting our project in Manipal and winning laurels.
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