Global Leadership Project - Day Four - Responses to the challenge

On Thursday morning, some of us were still enjoying our beauty sleep whilst a group of students decided to join one of our lovely UoB Alumni on a 4am Hike up Mt Parker in Tai Tam Country park to watch the sun rise from the peak. It was a sweaty, long, and hard hike, but the views from the top were absolutely worth it.

After a quick walk back down and a speedy shower, it was off to our final day of the project.

At 8:30am we all headed to HKU excited to fine tune our presentations and present them to the room.

The morning started off with us making any last minute adjustments to our plan, before dividing ourselves up between projects. In our working party we had one group making an illustrative poster to advertise our concept, one group filming a video to showcase our idea, one group writing a brief and also preparing the final presentation. It was all systems go!

Our films ideas were developed and then brought to life around the HKU campus, and we were very proud of our one.

We got everything uploaded onto the common purpose portal, and headed off for lunch.

After lunch, the room had been transformed with all chairs facing the stage, and a panel of local stakeholders sitting behind a desk, waiting to listen to our ideas and talk to us about our projects. The final panel consisted of Ian Holliday (Vice-President and Pro-Vice-Chancellor, University of Hong Kong), Vivian Hau (Founder & Executive Coach, Flow Consulting Limited) and Arrann Young (Director of Learning & Development, KPMG)

One by one, each group went and gave their presentations. Everyone had really incredible ideas, and it was hard to believe that we had come this far in just four days! The groups presented confidently and proudly, and the panel were wowed by the innovation in the room.

We received some incredible feedback from the panel, who were not only impressed with the innovative ideas which had been developed, but also at the way in which the groups were able to answer questions and challenges about their project, which demonstrated the thought and effort which had been put into these ideas.

Following the presentations and feedback, we moved our seats into a circle and we sat and discussed how we thought the project had gone from day one until now. We discussed how we performed as leaders, how we had developed and grown throughout the project, what we had learned about being a leader, and what we had learned about ourselves. It was very emotional and joyful to see everyone opening up with such confidence, even people who had been nervous and quiet on the first day.

It felt like a huge achievement, and we got into our working groups one final time in order to present each other with our graduation certificates. Our group did this with each person talking about what they admired about the person who's certificate they had been given, before announcing who that person was.

We headed outside for one final photo, and then said our goodbyes to all of our new friends, particularly the HKU students who had been so welcoming to us.

In the evening, we were very lucky that our very own Claire Belkadi was treating us to a fabulous dinner on the University! We were booked into a fab looking grill restaurant from 7pm.

Some of us, however, made a bit of a detour before dinner, as one of our guest speakers, Janet Pau, had given us the opportunity to attend an event hosted by the Asia Business Council about public health and climate change. The event was held in a small theatre at the Asia Society's headquarters (which were absolutely stunning), and had guest speakers (Nigel Snoad and Professor Kwok-Yung Yuen) who were discussing the challenges to public health caused by climate change, and the work that was going on with mosquitos in order to minimise the spread of such diseases. It was very interesting, and we are very grateful to Janet Pau for giving us the opportunity to attend.

We then headed to join the others for a delicious dinner, before heading off for our final night in Hong Kong. 

For our final night, a group of us decided to head back to the Temple Street night market to grab some last minute gifts. We had a nice slow after-dinner mooch through the stalls, bagged some bargains, and then stopped for a delicious fresh fruit smoothie. Then we waved a sad farewell to the night market, and headed back to bed ready for a busy day the next day. 

Some of the others headed to the harbour for some farewell drinks at the water's edge, and some tasty street food...