Goals to Excel
Walking the ramp has always been my least favorite activity. As much as I like dressing up, I have never been a fan on wobbling around in heels. And I certainly never expected to be asked to walk the ramp at a work- readiness program.
But this is not the first time Talerang has challenged me.
After watching a few YouTube videos, and with a little advice from my sister I was able to perform decently. Well, at least I didn’t fall, slip or break my head. I was home in one piece.
The agenda for the day had a mix of soft and hard skills training. We first covered the basics of goal setting and then moved onto PowerPoint and Excel training.
I have been thinking about what I want to achieve in my life since the beginning of my Talerang Journey. From the vision boards, 5th year reunions and 80th birthday plans. I always knew I was being too ambitious in my goals. Today was the first time I thought about whether these goals were achievable in this lifetime and about what I had to do to actually achieve them.
“When I was growing up I always wanted to be someone. Now I realize I should have been more specific.”
I too have this habit of leaving my goals open-ended. To give you a few examples:
I want to lose weight. This is not specific at all. If I had worded this to:
I want to become 49kgs in 3 weeks; I would be able to work towards something substantial.
Today, we used the SMART goal framework to convert our bucket lists into SMART goals.
Moving on, we spent the rest of the day polishing our PowerPoint and Excel skills. I realized that I had some serious amendments to make in the way I make my presentations because at my first day at my summer internship last year I was asked to make a PowerPoint deck on different actresses we could use for an upcoming video. I used a green background; different fonts made it text heavy. And thought I had done a fabulous job until I went into my manager’s cabin and saw him editing the entire presentation.
This session really helped me clarify a few things about PowerPoint presentations:
- It is important to keep in mind the purpose for which you are making the slide (presentation or deck)
- Every slide must have a title or it is meaningless, Title must portray what the key takeaway from the slide is.
- Preferable to use sentence case and be consistent.
- Arial size 10 is most widely used in the professional context.
- White background is the way to go
- Slide master helps make life much simpler
- PowerPoint Presentation is the tool and not the presenter
I have never been one of those computer and programming whizzes and was really looking forward to getting enlightened about Excel at this session.
I have to admit the session was confusing- Vlookup, Pivot table, and Command shift down. It was all to fast for me to take in at once and my laptop being different from the others didn’t help my cause much either. Thankfully the Talerang team came to the rescue.
I was amazed at how excel could really make my life simple once I had mastered the art of using it. My takeaway was that excel is a brilliant tool that just requires a little bit of getting used to. And so my goal till the end of my internship is to be able to use excel without the mouse. (I have made this goal of mine action-oriented and time bound)
It had been a long productive day from walking the ramp, to goal setting, PowerPoint and excel. It saddens me to think that we just have one more session. Just one more email from the Talerang team with the homework and pre-work and just one last day of training before we enter the ‘real world’.
