Mahmud -Mohammed Afimfiwey: Grab these little opportunities; You will soon need them (Part Two)
In last week’s edition, I discussed two important opportunities students still studying in the tertiaries can avail themselves to: working while on the programme and mastering the patience of following and later learning to lead.
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In this final part, my attention is still focused on the little opportunities that line our ways as undergraduates or persons doing one form of advanced degree or another. Interestingly, the cartoon illustration accompanying the article was very apt in claiming that “opportunities come disguised as hard work.” No illustration could have captured the essence of this piece better!
Tech-based prospects
When Mark Zuckerberg entered Harvard as a freshman, it was clear he did not, unlike Bill Gates, intend to found a tech company as iconic, profitable and famous as Facebook. That a simple little technology activity restricted to Harvard student community at the time was going to become the bedrock of a future commercial activity the like and size of one of all-time ten best technology companies around the world was clearly unthinkable.
But when you come to think of this whole technology race in strictly global terms, your heart is bound to break and your faith in the African to give the world a Bill Gates, a Mark Zuckerberg, a Steve Jobs fades and in the end gets shattered. When you are currently taking a programme in any one of the universities in Ghana, and if you are in the computer engineering school or department, maybe your time has just arrived.
From writing special programmes that turn kids with numerical learning disabilities into numbers-lovers, demystifying science all the way to erecting modest resource centres online where kids can go when they have to complete a take-home school assignment, opportunities abound for students still on campus.
As the nation contemplates what it might do next in the face of an age of computer automation and computer-assisted-learning, those of you still in college may be the ones from whose ingenuity the nation can figure out what this computer automation of learning may look like.
Creating an amateur online resource centre for children and adolescent can be the starting point. When that works, scaling this project up and getting the first set of schoolchildren on it on pilot basis may be the beginning of the birth of the man or woman Ghana is giving to the world as our tech ambassador.
The business ideas that birthed tech-based businesses like the Tonaton.com and all the others might not have started on the campus of KNUST but that does not wipe out the hope that any one of these campuses may be the birthplace of some simple but solution-inspired tech piece that sticks Ghana solidly and conspicuously on the global map.
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Literary opportunities
Writing is another area of unexploited opportunities; whether writing for the hall level publication, faculty level critiquing of the activities of students as well as PhD gurus all help refine our literary abilities and trim the edges of our future write-ups. With the proliferation of the media, opportunities undreamt about have become handy: From doing amateur reporting for a local press to forwarding your little write-ups for review by international online presses, you could be learning to earn a living the literary way and preparing to be our future, more advanced version of Wole Soyinka, Ngugi Wa’Tiongo or our own beloved and late Kofi Awoonor.
The recent, almost full fallout of Ghanaians from prestigious global literary contests and the near handing over of the literary heritage of our continent to Nigeria and Kenya is a disturbing subject. You may be that writer who will be telling the story of Africa from the summit of the Akwapim Range of Mountains, the clay huts of the savannas or the slums of Nima. And you do not necessarily have to be taking English as a course in your present institution!
Broadcasting openings
Almost every public university and polytechnic in the country is fitted with a community radio. Offering oneself as amateur broadcaster in any one of these little studios is a great way to try one’s hands on radio and broadcasting related jobs.
??Apart the future prospects of employment broadcasting offers, hosting a talk show, disk jockeying or simply doing whatever kind of show is learning to speak, mastering how to overcome crowd panic and building self-confidence and networking.
Besides, whether you do this radio practice as amateur or you wish to push these limits to professional levels, broadcasting opens up a whole new world of great experiences. Apart from the mere possibility of meeting people who matter (because microphones have always been given to people who matter), even at the student level, you get to know what your peers think and in the process learn to figure out what antidotes work for them.
Little dealerships and commerce
Creating a little business that specialises in representing large ventures that organise events in and around the university communities and beyond is an opportunity business school students may want to interest themselves in. Selling events tickets, arranging venues for functions and representing these entities in the region may not only harvest modest income for the student but will open the eyes of the beneficiary to the vast opportunities that the entire country hosts.
Commercialising the vast resources of project works of the university is another way of learning to dare oneself. Preparing proposals for a project this ambitious and helping the university work come into the mainstream business community may not be a novel idea but to get it to fly, even if modestly, is a progress along one’s learning curve.
The reason I continue to stress the point that students on campus have a better shot at accomplishing these opportunities is that university campuses, with their isolation from daily distractions and the abundance of large pool of human and material resources, are simply awaiting immediate deployment by any member of the community. Besides, the students themselves are shielded from the many, often overly demanding exigencies of life after college.
If you currently are a member of any one of the university communities in Ghana, make good use of this membership. As a member of the community, you are privileged to walk into any of the offices of this community and seek any form of assistance.
Your licence to procure information is more valid as a present member than after the university has handed you the certificate. Because, as it often turns out, if Bill Gate were not a member of the school that availed him the computers at the time when we could count computers in the entire world, chances are that he may never have discovered the enormous opportunities that were breaking up. And if Mark Zuckerberg had not been in the phenomenally endowed Harvard campus, maybe the mere idea of amusing oneself with the university community may never have come up at all; let alone be developed into a book of faces. — GB