Happy Birthday Taiwan

The days are starting to blend together - read cases, prepare cases, eat, shower, sleep, go to career prep sessions, and repeat. Last week was the weekend where I caught myself in a downward spiral - without enough sleep, not working out, and not being in my best state. I was cranky, irritable and low on energy. Instead of going to yet another prep session on Tuesday, I decided to go straight home and head to the gym. Just 50 minutes at the gym made all the difference, and it’s a worthwhile investment I need to remind myself over and over again. At the beginning of the school year, we heard about only being able to choose 2 of the 3 - social life, academics and career prep, and sleep. New experiences was something I prioritized, academics and career prep seemed like something I shouldn’t let go, so sleep had to volunteer as tribute. Because it’s more likely to happen when I say it out loud - I hope that I can at least workout every other day even when I don’t always have enough time to sleep.

Moving on to one of the first new experiences - playing football (a.k.a soccer). Our class is organized in sections where we have campus present, and as section Madrid, we decided to wear white (instead of pink on a Tuesday).A lot of my classmates from Latin America, Spain, or India are very knowledgeable and skilled in the sport, whereas I was there standing on the field constantly feeling confused. We didn’t play the full court and had 7 players on each team. Apart from the goalie, we were organized into three rough layers - the people in the front preparing to score, people in the middle field ready to support either way, and people in the back ready to defend.

Back to the title - the class of 24 Taiwanese students got together and celebrated the birthday of Taiwan. Everyone prepared a dish as part of the potluck and man everyone knows how to cook.

Even after spending 10 years in the US, meeting Taiwanese people was still a lot easier to start conversations and just feels like home. We laughed, we gossiped, we talked about our experiences finding new friends in school, we talked about what we did before, and of course we talked about how delicious all the food were.

Today we did a team building exercise that reminded me of the good ole’ EGL days. It was a simulation where we each played a part of a VP at Snapple. We all had our own agenda items with different information present on our information packet, and had to go through a decision making process together. Conflict Management style according to the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument can be categorized into 5 different styles - competing (my interest » your interest), collaborating (let’s get both of our interests), compromising (we’ll each get some of our interests), avoiding (let’s not have a conflict) and accommodating (your interest > my interest). Knowing my own style was interesting and also gave me very pointed directions on how and what to be aware of when conflicts arise in the future.

Super excited that Wednesday is a holiday cutting the week in half. Until next week :)