Attended
a language exchange section last night. Again I was inspired by some of the new
friends that I meet there. After talking to a few people, I started realizing
that how mundane my daily job seemed to be and how urgent I should look for
another job that can provide me some opportunities to upgrade my technical
skills and interact more with others. I am kind of stuck in my current jobs.
There were people from different countries with diverse background and life
experiences. They shared what they were doing and how they came to here to work
and live since most of them were expatriates. I don’t have many opportunities
to discuss with others in topics other than something related to the industry
that I am working with. People shared something like the recent scientific
development in medical field or an insider’s information about how interviews
of a big IT company were conducted…I was intrigued by what they said and for
me, what they said was something really helpful that could help me to jump out
of my very own small world.
Not
only the topics and the content, but the accents and the ways they presented their
ideas that interested me a lot. American, local and even Indian English could
be heard the whole night. Talking to them and trying to learn and perhaps
imitate their accents, ways of presenting an idea and body languages were
something important in developing my soft skills that I could hardly find in my
office and existing social circle. How nice it would be and I could not imagine
how big the impact would be in my life if I could have an intellectual
conversation with different people everyday, even it was just a 10 minutes
conversation. Took a look on the language learning mobile application that
presently exists in the market, I believed that it was possible to do it. I
would like to try to talk to strangers using the app in a daily basis with a
plan like below. The first and second weeks, we would discuss more on the
general topics like language learning, travelling, food and even family. After
that, it is time to discuss more about the topics that people may have
different opinions on and I would learn how to be a listener and listen to
their reasons of taking certain stands in certain topics. If the person is
still cool and keen to share what is in his/her mind, we would move on to more
complicated topics about religion, politics, races and etc. I am not really
sure how many people can reach the third phase if I kick start my plan mentioned
above by talking to 100 strangers. No matter how the results would be, it is
better to try and find out.
(471words)
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