The Transition: A big step towards my dream.

The one question you invariably get when you are about to graduate is ‘what next?’ What do you want to do with your life? Are you getting into grad school straight away or looking to take a break? What do you really want to be in life and a few others like when are you getting married and stuff! At this moment of time, everyone seems to have a question and unsurprisingly you start to follow. Then you remember the age old cliche about how one must follow his/her passion in life and greatness will follow. Next thing you start questioning is if you really have a passion, even if you find a one you start doubting whether it actually has a career round it and before you begin finding answers your friends are getting married, some are already into grad schools abroad, some are already into good salaried jobs and you are the only one looking for answers.

Maybe it was my proactive nature; I never waited for 4 years to begin figuring out the answers. Not that I know all of it, like when  or if I’ll ever get married (haha) but questions about what I want to do with my life has always been in the center of my attention. Like everyone else, I have also looked at what passion I have so that tomorrow when times get tough, the sheer enthusiasm I have for the thing I love will drive me to come out fighting of the challenging phase and take me to somewhere beautiful; somewhere I can find immense pleasure and satisfaction and realize that the dots had actually been connecting all this while.

I have always been known to be a good student, a ‘topper’ if you will except  the two times I failed, once in grade 2 Mathematics and the other time in class 9 Accounts mid-term exam. The latter has an interesting story to it but let’s not get there now.  I think I have excelled in academics ever since solely because of my interest in knowledge creation- when someone is creating knowledge for me to gain a perspective and also when I share my knowledge to develop someone else’s perspective. So coming back to all the questions I rose earlier, it was obvious to me that I had to do something with my life that involved knowledge creation to better lives; to develop perspectives in people. At the same time youth was another thing I was quite keen on, I was determined to work with youth and channelized all their energies into something good through knowledge creation. Hence, knowledge creation in youth became my passion and I've been working on ways to make something out of this connection. This is the exact reason why I call myself an education enthusiast because the passion I share to enrich the lives of youth through knowledge creation by building perspectives is what drives me to make a change in our education industry.

I’m and was never satisfied. People tell me that I've aced my present undergrad education but it saddens me that I’m good at something I’m not satisfied with. Just the other day I was talking to a friend who was preparing for her marketing exam. I wished her all the best and not to worry about the paper, suggesting her to be creative with her answers and that everything would fall into place. Her reply “Try being creative in a Pokhara University paper and you’ll be appearing for the same exam again next year’’ was so strong and undeniable that I surrendered to her. In another instance, my friend who has relatively good experience with sales as a profession scored the lowest marks in class assignment because she was supposed to write from the book and not what the 'actual' scenario in the market was. Such is the situation of our education system that critical thinking and creativity are ignored. With my experience from having appeared in over 100 exams during my undergraduate level, one thing which is so frustratingly true is that if you try to be critical and creative with your answers, there is 90% chance that you won’t be completing all your questions; such is the way question papers are framed because being critical and creative demands thinking and then writing by giving it a good shape and form with a nice flow. Thinking and writing takes time. There is no time. Try spending more than 15 minutes in one question and you’re struggling to catch up with the pace of the exam. So what is our education system doing? Preparing us to write rote answers in our paper? I guarantee you’ll forget everything once you come out of the exam center. So what’s the use?

The use is that you’ll develop conceptual knowledge about the different management terms and techniques which are important too, no doubt. However, is that only enough? Is studying only for the sake of passing the final exams to grab a degree in your hand enough? Consider how many others are graduating with you from the same class. Now add the others from the next section. Add the whole of your university to it. Then add other universities to it. Getting intense already! And by the way, you haven’t forgotten about your school friends who are spending crazy money for the foreign degree abroad so that they’ll have an edge over you in the market place have you?

My personal opinion is no way, not nearly enough. It makes me sad that as a 3.94 GPA student I didn't have the skills required to approach a new person to do business with, to put my point across, make him/her understand my point of view and convince them that whatever I’m saying or about to do is good for both of us and that he/she should take me seriously. I wonder would my degree have sold in the market just because I’m a 3.94 student but lacked these skills essential in the market.  I started realizing that it wasn't happening for me.

 I started working when I was 19 (I’m 22 now). My friends who didn't have the same level of academic excellence were doing better than me. I wondered why that was happening but sooner rather than later I started realizing that it was the soft skills that gave them an upper hand over me because like they say, ‘It’s the hard skills that get you the job but its the the soft skills that keep you in it’. The proactive nature in me wouldn't allow me to accept being second best- I started looking at ways to constantly improve. Six months earlier I came across an interesting training from Mr. Arniko Singh whom I had good relations with since my time at Biruwa Ventures. In America, he had worked for a billion dollar company called Cbeyond which had developed amazing techniques to persuade people to help their sales people sell office solutions worth $24000 per contract by cold calling. (After all a billion dollar company wouldn't earn a billion dollars if it wasn't for its sales people bringing in revenue). I was fascinated to know what this training was like- I mean seriously going into an unknown person's office and convincing them to buy a product worth $24000 (or 24 Lacs approx.) was obviously not a joke. So I along with few other friends from Ace Institute of Management took this 6 day training which involved heavy role playing focusing on the specific scripts on what to say to people, how to run a meeting, how to approach a big player in the industry to finally making the client sign contracts. The amazing thing about this training was unlike the ‘what’ aspects our books taught us, it focused on the specific ‘hows’, the exact scripts that were required to communicate better to persuade and the best thing for me was that this persuasion training wasn't only related to business, I would now use it anywhere I wanted, from family to friends and beyond. The main theme was that product isn't important; the buyer has to like you to buy from you. So the focus was on selling yourself through effective communication and persuading techniques to create a favorable situation with the client- whether it be selling or doing some other business or even impressing in a job interview.

Looking back at it now, the dots were already starting to connect. Once I took the training myself and became convinced that it was like non-other, Shristi Mishra (co-project lead and a longtime friend) and Mr. Arniko Singh (CEO of Singha Group with over 700 clients in Kathmandu who had over a year’s experience mastering this technique in America as part of his sales call as well as a training  new recruits for the fortune 500 company), we decided to make this training available to all the students in Nepal so that with this resource, they could do more with their lives and get ahead in the market instead of just focusing on the final exams which did little to enhance their employ-ability.
As aspiring educationists this would be the perfect base for us to start working on this industry- an industry that needs complete reform in terms of what is taught and how things are taught to the future of our country- the youths. As a student myself, the harsh ground reality is that students have the hard skills but they don’t know how to approach their own college’s top executives. I’m saying this from my experience when as part of my class presentation; I asked my classmates how many of them dared to set up a meeting with our chairman. Sadly no one raised their hands. It was a sad reality check that so called business leaders of tomorrow gave me such a demoralizing response but I didn't blame them. We've been taught to think ‘what’ not ‘how’. It’s like we are taught theories of swimming, asked about different characteristics and benefits of swimming and in the end everyone’s thrown into the swimming pool. The ones who have their networks inside the pool will find a way to keep floating and well for the ones like me with no prior network, we are ‘gone case’ like my friends used to say.  We ask our students to be confident but we don’t tell them what exactly needs to be said and done in order to appear confident. I mean if I don’t know the right thing to say or do, how the hell am I going to be confident in front of others, especially top top names, the big players in the industry if you will.

But now it's time for a complete change. We will bridge the gap between academics and the industry. We won't blindfold the students and tell them that everyone has an equal opportunity in life- that's a total lie. The reality is that you may be the topper of your batch but your friend whose father runs a million dollar company will have an edge over you. No questions asked! But the best thing now is that we will give the students the exact scripts, the exact ways, the exact 'hows' that'll assist them in every step they take in their lives.I'm tired of being told what is. I wanted the exact 'hows' and now I'm on a mission to make this available to all Nepali students-the soft skills that will help them make their mark regardless of whether they are toppers or average students. After all, nobody will look at your grades in the future. You'll have to impress in the first shot and trust me, nobody has the time to listen to your struggle story. We talk about networking, this that but the reality is people will only network with you if you have something for them. Like a movie I watched recently says, "Apparently the world is not a wish granting factory".

It’s been around 2 months since we've started approaching business schools to go that extra mile and make this tried and tested selling and persuading techniques used by billion dollar companies in the USA available to their students to ensure that this much needed value addition helps students separate themselves from others in the market. After all, a college’s success depends on the alumni it is able to build in the long run. Colleges are providing the hard skills and kudos to them for trying hard to get the best faculty to equip the students with the conceptual knowledge and we are trying to go hand in hand with them and give these students the soft skills to actually make a difference. Like I said earlier, the energy that the youth have is amazing and it is our responsibility to channelize this energy into something productive. At a time when data shows that the youth in Nepal is the most underutilized, if we can give them the scarce resource that has been so successful in the most developed country in the world then why not?

Yes, there are a lot of challenges involved no doubt. Colleges admit that the gap between education and industry has widened but some don’t want to take the burden at a time when they are doing so well regardless, some are progressive and welcoming but the students are happy to be just appearing in the finals. However, there are times when you are inspired to carry on and made to believe that what you are doing is worth everything. Just yesterday, a man in his mid 40ish who owns a book shop came looking for me in our training house and commended us for our efforts and asked if his age was a barrier against his wish to enroll in our training. And when we see our students give us reviews as such below, it gives me an immense feeling of fulfillment that yes, we are contributing to something constructive and that we must go on. After all, my hunger for knowledge creation in building perspectives of youth is what has made my entry into the education industry worth all my time and energy and guess what? I’m here to stay because I’m Sagar Satyal and I’m no pushover!

Like we say in our office, if a system is made by the people, the system can be changed and this is just the beginning!

And one last thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8HMmUgQWC0

Cheers!