Their story, in their words…..
To begin, we’d want to express our gratitude to Margaret and the Mark Evison Foundation for providing us with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to face a personal challenge that leads to the development of vital life skills that will benefit us later in life. We went to Cambridge for 3 days to shoot a promo video for the city as well as do some photography to create a photo album. Honestly, at first, we thought this challenge would be quite easy, but little did we know, we were entering a completely new phase in our life that we’ve never experienced before.
To begin, we had to organise our trip to Cambridge, which would be our first time living away from home alone, so being alone was already a challenge and a skill we needed to master. The planning required a few weeks because various things had to be considered, including travel, hostel reservations, and editing software.
Then came the most exciting aspect of the project: the journey to Cambridge. We arrived too early on the first day, so we couldn’t utilise the hostel, which slowed us down a little because we were fatigued from the bus ride. However, when we had rested, we went for a walk about the city to explore and make a list of places we wanted to see the next day. That was the first day.
On the second day, we proceeded to the city centre and recorded as many sights as possible, from the punting walk to the Botanic Garden. We finished the day by wandering about and eating at a nearby restaurant. On our third and last day, we went to museums that we couldn’t get into the day before since we didn’t realise we needed to book ahead of time. After that it was time to wave goodbye to Cambridge. We learned and developed key skills such as living away from home as well as adapting to a new environment which is quite different to the Asian community I was raised around.
After the trip, came the hardest part of this project, the editing. We underestimated how hard it would be to edit so it took us many hours and days of practice before we could produce our final promo video. From this we’ve learned to not be deceived by the looks of something. Throughout the whole journey, I cannot mention enough the amount of new stuff we’ve learned. We drastically improved our communication abilities by having to communicate with new people, starting from the hostel and all the way to the museums. We also mastered the skill of budgeting. We had a limited budget which surprisingly did not trouble us at all. The video was the longest process of this journey but at the end it all worked out for us.
Overall, although there has been some bad timings, underestimation and struggles with finding a place to stay at, this experience was well worth it and was the highlight of our summer holiday so we highly recommend everyone to take part in this challenge to get to explore that a world that you would never think you’d come across.
