Chan Weng Kit's Blogspot: DAY 526-530

Feb 8 - 12

1) Over the weekend, I made a trip to Sheffield for the Projek Amanat Negara (PAN) XV 2018 Conference, organised by UKEC and held at the University of Sheffield. As talking about my entire trip will take too long, in this blogpost I will focus on the PAN Conference itself, which took place on Saturday (10th Feb).

2) The previous night, all of us involved met up at the venue, where we were given a quick tour and assigned our roles for the big day. The event would be a whole day event - starting with registration at 8.30am, and ending at 6.00pm. After registration ended, everyone was ushered into the auditorium. After welcoming greetings and speeches from the PAN Director (Vik), UKEC Chairperson (Faizul) and officiation by H.E. Dato' Rasidi b. Hazizi (High Commissioner of Malaysia to UK and Ireland), we kickstarted with Session 1: Electoral Dynamics in Malaysia. We had three panellists - Mr Amir Fareed, Mr Shahril Hamdan, and Prof. Meredith L. Weiss - while the moderator was Ms Izza Izelan. It was an especially entertaining talk, even more so considering our General Election is approaching soon.

3) After the event, we proceeded to the Gallery Area for our next session - networking with various speakers. By this time, I had met up with Mr. Wan Fayhsal (Secretary General, Assembly of Malay Civilisation (ADAB)) who was one of the networking speakers as well as panellist for another event. For the networking session, participants were given a chance to have a conversation and Q & A with the speaker, in a very relaxed and informal environment. There was so much interest in engaging with the speakers that we decided to let the session run over lunch.

4) After having my lunch, I met up with the some of the organisers of the next session (Session 2: Breakout Session). In this session, four societies would be having their own sessions concurrently, with different target audiences in mine. We had KPUM (law), YME (engineering), MBIOS (biomed) and KALSOM (volunteer movement). As I was the session manager for MBIOS, we went to prep the room together. The event that MBIOS planned was an MUN-esque Crisis simulation - where delegates adopted the role of relevant bodies/organisations to discuss and suggest proposals to tackle "crises". In this case, we had to tackle a "PAN-demic: Nipah Virus Outbreak". Overall, the event went smoothly, with lots of active participation (which is always nice because in some crises delegates may be shy to rise and speak).

5) On to the next session - Session 3: Myth of the Lazy Native. Held at Firth Hall (the oldest and I'd wager most beautiful part of the campus), this discussion had three distinguished speakers - Prof. Maznah Mohamad, Dr. Khairudin Aljunied, and Mr. Wan Fayhsal Wan Ahamad. The topic was an eye opener for sure - based on a book written in 1966 by Syed Hussein Alatas - which addressed the question why Western colonialists had, for four centuries, thought that the natives of Maritime Southeast Asia to be generally lazy. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the various perspectives that the speakers had for this session.

6) Our final session was a Closing Keynote by Mr. Kishva Ambigapathy, the current Chairperson of the Commonwealth Youth Council. Talking about his history and his rise from humble beginnings, and how he would not let others define what he could or could not do - his speech provided the perfect ending for the event; congruent with PAN XV's theme of 'Think Again - A Paradigm Shift". At around this time, I had to catch a taxi back to Sheffield Station, as I had a train to catch. Unfortunately, that meant I couldn't stick around for the post-mortem discussion that our team had. Anyway, that was the end of a proper tiring yet rewarding day. Do scroll down for just some of the pics captured during the event. Thanks so much for visiting, cheers!