by Ioana-Irina URS
So, here I am, ready to go to the US, on a 1 month and a half paid fellowship program from GLC – Teach Democracy), starting in April 2017.
I still cannot believe it. We were 22 candidates, 15 out of which had more experience than me and worked with bigger organizations. I could not help but wonder what– besides my obvious charm –had made the difference?
It all started in November 2016, just a couple of weeks before I attended the Erasmus+ project “Story-Down Walls” in Cluj-Napoca. I heard about a fellowship in the States and thought I might apply. It was for professionals in NGOs, who do community organizing with minorities. For bettering leadership skills and improving the effectiveness of the overall process of community organizing. It is something I have, unofficially, been trying to do, and, officially – would like to be doing, but it sounds quite difficult and complex. The deadline was December 1st, so I did not start working on my application right away, because I did not know exactly how to incorporate my little official experience in a serious application. So I waited for a solution and wandered if my application could ever be good enough in a world of professionals.
In the meantime, an interesting training, by international trainers Paula, Ulla, Vedat, and Abdu, crossed my path. We learned that our whole life story matters in shaping who we are even as professionals, and how to share that story so that people will listen. And while, for the story I am sharing now, I am using “In Medias Res” (as I learned it was called – during the same training ), I decided that the best way to write my application was just by letting the jury know about my motivation through my life story – and I used the “Sparklines” method (how did I not forget that name yet?) to dig into my past and expose my motivation to apply. My organization is just 2 years old, and my official experience in working with minorities is less than 8 months. Still, when the results came, my name was on the short list of winners of the fellowship (https://www.facebook.com/glcteachdemocracy/?ref=page_internal), along with 4 other Romanian names.
While I am sure I have other qualities as well, I wish to thank the “Story-Down Walls” organizers and trainers for doing a great job in helping me better express those qualities in a story.
I hope as many people as possible will get to benefit from such a training course. Knowing how to organize our ideas so that we are better understood and how to tell our stories so that they make the most sense and are really relevant to the listener is – I believe – essential, especially in the world of professionals of any field. It may be, at times, that which actually makes the difference.
