AIESEC in NUS Blog

"I feel like Chee Soon Juan," quipped Imran, much to my amusement, in his opening lines on Saturday 29th September at the National Sales Training held in SMU. For those of you who are unaware, Chee Soon Juan is an ex NUS psychology professor who is (in)famous in his capacity as Secretary-General of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), for orchestrating rallies in public.


So why the reference to a political dissenter? Because believe it or not, our training session was held on the steps of some random empty space in the middle of SMU, after having been caught trying to sneak non-SMU AIESECers up the lift to the seminar room. After all this drama, we traipsed about in search of alternative space, but not before grabbing some breakfast along the way from this place that sells cheap and yummy tea drinks and toast. With our food and drink in tow, we all got comfy on the steps. Despite the unconventional setting and the lack of technological aid, the training session was a rather fruitful one. Presenters who had spent hours preparing elaborate powerpoint slides, had to suddenly change tactic to find ways to keep us engaged. This struck me as an interesting attestation to the AIESECer spirit and ability to think on our feet.

We started off by getting acquainted through a round of a “speed-dating” icebreaker game, which helped loosen up the atmosphere and got everyone somewhat acquainted with all the new faces. My head was still reeling from all the new names and faces when a bunch of handouts with information about AIESEC was passed around. I braced myself for more information overload, haha.

Imran, as the key speaker for the day, led the training session, equipping us with the best ways to sell AIESEC, how to be intuitive and read the signs during a meeting with big scary corporate people, the right questions to ask and the various ways in which AIESEC products, with their features, benefits and advantages, can be packaged to convince potential investors to give us a chance.

To make things interesting, Imran interspersed his “speech” (no powerpoint remember) with inspiring quotes. One quote that I can remember off the top of my head is, “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.” This was meant to encourage us to create a 2-way process of communication through effective dialogue between AIESEC and various business corporations. To give us a feel of this dialogue process, we took turns to role play as Managers and AIESECers. I think the line, “AIESEC is the international platform for young people to discover and develop their potential,” is ingrained on my mind forever because of the number of times I repeated it during our role-playing. This raised questions about how to avoid coming across as sounding scripted and mechanical. In response, Imran cited experience as the best way for being able to mean what you say.

We also went through the dry but important legal aspects of contracts and agreements. This was followed by pizza for lunch (yum!). After lunch, we had a quick session on branding and communications. (Everyone was quite restless by then!) We ended off with a requisite cam-whoring session! Fun! For those of you who couldn’t make it, you missed a great training session!