In the ambit of community

The thing I like the most about finally getting into college is the independence I have to learn, grow and expand my outlook. As a child, I was often under the burden of predefined school and societal curriculum, and limited freedom to avoid things I didn’t wish to experience (though, it turned out fine). With that coming to a sweet end with the beginning of my college life, I had a decade worth’s adrenaline rush in a span of two years. But things are a lot different once we grow up. In a higher education institutional setup, what matters to one’s success is less of what we put into ourselves and more of what we take from the community. With the student life being globalized and significantly intertwined with the peer network, it is strange that it takes a lot of time for people to realize that their success and their growth is now in the ambit of their community. With such a huge knowledge base to audit and a tiny blob of time in our hands, making the community distribute the load and help us is a thing not difficult to understand. Even then, the idea of synergizing with a community appears distant to many of us who have been through the pressurizing and envy driven phase of college admissions. Who is to blame? No one.

We are to blame if we don’t evolve to the needs of our career and start prioritizing developing mature relationships with our community of students. It doesn’t require huge efforts. It needs 3 basic things:

1. It demands us to keep our envy and pride aside and listen. Listening to people is the first step of making a community mature. Listen, Listen, Listen! Even if you know all about what someone is speaking about, if you give them your attention, you successfully create a channel of knowledge-flow in the community. The next time when someone gets to know about something interesting, you won't have to put in physical efforts to extract that from them. The channel does it all by itself.
2. The second thing is expression. The channel strengthens when you give your inputs in a discussion and see to it that the conversation is balanced.
3. The third and most important thing which hardly a few people are able to exploit consciously is smartly downplaying one’s abilities. People don’t like when pride enters communication. However, they do like it when they are unconsciously the superior one in a conversation. This helps a better and detailed transfer of knowledge and clear expression of ideas. So, a little controlled disregard towards our abilities can make the speaker feel good about her/his knowledge and help strengthen and increase the interaction within the community. No one gets hurt, everyone feels good, community strengthens and knowledge transfer is smooth. What else do we need?

In the time of intertwined fortunes, our community’s success is individual success.

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Happy Coding!