Volunteering Experience in Nop - Personal Experience Speech

Good evening everyone. Assalam-o-Alaikum. My name is Syed Muhammad Zubair and today I will talk about my volunteering experience in NOP center at LUMS this summer.

The agenda for today is that first of all, I will give you a brief overview of NOP session, why I volunteered there, my role, challenges I faced and at the end, some valuable lessons and achievements I got from it.

So, NOP session is basically held every summer in which bright students from all over Pakistan are selected after a rigorous scrutiny purely on the basis of merit. This time, the merit cut off was 94% marks. The main purpose of this session is to give the students an idea about sat and prepare them for it. It also serves as an opportunity for financially challenged students to study at LUMS after scoring good scores in sat. This session lasts for 2 weeks which consists of motivational lectures, sessions about presentation skills and critical thinking, extra-curricular activities and so on.

The first and foremost reason why did I choose to volunteer in this session and not do an internship because I did not get one. I was also once an NOP student so it felt good to be on the other side of class and teach the students. NOP center has a very healthy work environment, the mentors, instructors everyone is so cooperative that you don’t feel down after a hectic day at work. And we got food coupons of every meal which was a plus point of this session.

Now let me tell you about my role. So this time, NOP center introduced a new activity in cooperation with admission office to conduct interviews of every student to judge their interpersonal skills and confidence now which will help the admission office to decide how much a student has changed over the course of one year when they will be called for interview for admission. But they wanted to keep it “rogue”, so they gave it a catchy name “let’s catch up”. I was a part of this team who had to conduct the interviews of almost 600 students in 2 weeks. My role was to conduct the interview, record it and after some post processing, submit them to the NOP center. We also had to maintain the discipline but it was not a difficult task.

As much as I enjoyed the interview session, it was definitely not a piece of cake. First challenge was the logistic problem. We were asked to bring our personal cameras and IST department had to provide other essentials but they did not cooperate with us. Also, IST department used to remain closed on Sundays so we had to introduce contingency plans to complete the logistics on time.

Time management was a very big issue. A session lasted for one and a half hour and we were supposed to interview 40 students in this duration. They told us to give no more than 4 minutes to each student. It was very hard to give proper time to give proper time to every student in the beginning.