Imagine you had the opportunity to play a game on campus where you can win some money. Here’s the catch: You have no idea of what that game looks like, what’s going to happen or the rules to win.
This was exactly how I felt walking in to the first meeting of The Game on September 25, a new program run by ILead. You may have seen those mysterious-looking posters around campus in September. I was very excited, but at the same time, nervous.
Looking around GB202, I saw both familiar and new faces, about 40 people in total. The organizers asked everyone to pair up with someone they didn’t know. Then they gave each pair a Twix chocolate bar that we were to share while getting to know each other. Attached to that chocolate bar was an icebreaker question. Mine was: “Describe one moment where you took a leap a faith.” I ended up sharing the time I dyed myself purple for Frosh week years ago as a First Year student. So far, so good.
Just when I thought the fun stuff would end and we’d get down to discovering what The Game was, we next played truth or dare. All of a sudden, I start to realize that the point of these activities was to get everyone sharing some laughs. Watching someone do jumping jacks while singing “Everybody Clap your Hands,” or hearing someone admit the last lie they told, built a sense of community right away.
So at this point I’m thinking to myself, “Are we going to form our teams yet?” I made the assumption that The Game would be a team sport. It turns out that there’s still more activities in store for us. In groups of three, we next had to come up with two lists: things we enjoy doing and things that we don’t. From these lists, we had to decide what our three core values were as individuals. And it gets more interesting. We also had to try to determine our other group members’ values based on the things they put on their lists. I couldn’t identify people’s values on the first go, but it gave me a really good sense of what kind of people I might be dealing with in The Game. Any of these people can be in my future team.
As the session came to a close, we were asked to come up with a Twitter statement describing our own vision for a better world. Here was mine: “A better world starts with being aware of the environment around you, and using your emotions, values, and passion to create action that will have meaningful impact.”
So instead of forming teams as I thought would happen, I ended up learning interesting things about myself and those around me. With so many surprises thrown at us in the first meeting, I don’t know what to expect at this point. My guess though is that more surprises are in store, and the point might be to help us engineers embrace the unknown.
-Kevin Saludares