Overall Experience of 2019 Leadership Convention

The Qingdao Leadership Convention was a really fun experience and I learned a lot. It was quite different from the 2018 convention in Shanghai, even though it was the same organization. For the first round, we worked with Chinese students and learned about how they work together and present. When we actually went to present, we were a little surprised by how small the stage was, especially compared to last year. We could barely fit all our team members on stage! What was even more surprising was the Q&A part. Some questions were really hard and irrelevant to our project. For the second round, I was able to meet a lot of different people and learn about the work styles of different people and how to work with these different styles. At first, my group wasn't very accepting of me. For the Gold of Desert King event, I realized that I had a very interesting group. Mainly a small group did all the work while the rest of the group did meaningless tasks, which slowly became the rest of the group going on their phones. When we actually started on the project, the group worked in the same way. Only after our coach told them that they could use the Hong Kong and American student did they include us, but they only asked us about our experiences in the US and HK. When I asked them what I could do to help, they always told me that there wasn't anything they needed help with. Because of this, more than half of the group spent the time on their phones. However, towards the end, the rest of the group was able to contribute more and we became closer as a group. For the third round, It was quite similar to last year, but the topic was much less controversial. We also discussed the topic before going on stage. Compared to last year, I definitely built closer relationships with the other students, both American and Chinese, that came to the convention.