Unlearning to learn

In our very first month, almost all EITs were confused. The MEST program was the first of its kind in Africa and in many ways, we were the guinea pigs...or the pioneers, if you will. Us, and the EITs ahead of us. Some assumptions about the program were still being tested and tweaked as the program progressed. First, we quickly learned that the ‘school’ in the MEST name was misleading. This wasn’t a school. Far from it. It was very hands-on. It was you and your team. No teachers, only fellows and faculty. No grades and transcripts, only ‘your project’ worked or it didn’t. We learnt by doing. It was hard, it was exhausting. They warned us. We signed for it anyways.

Despite the requirements of the program, it provided us with the right environment and tools to succeed. The program provided EITs three hot meals a day, a place to live throughout the two years, a laptop, a monthly stipend (I know right! I also didn’t believe it when I first heard it) and access to world class fellows who who were on site to teach communications, software engineering, business. Those who exceeded expectations got a few cedis more that the average. This. Was. Not. A. School! We did stuff. We broke stuff and we learnt through that process. 

There was a learning curve nonetheless. I still remember our first assignment - a PowerPoint deck about us. It was the ugliest deck I had ever created. Months later, MEST magically transformed us into presentation zens (pick any MESTer at random, he/she would crush a presentation). But it didn’t happen overnight. Each EIT worked on at least one deck per week, until we became polished enough to present in front of an audience. Our public speaking was improved through tech buzz. An initiative our senior faculty introduced. The task was to read a current tech article and present it in 90 seconds without missing the key parts. By our second year, we were pros.

One major learning was how to reference and acknowledge other people’s work in our research and communication. An important lesson. I read a good number of books at MEST. As part of the program, we were assigned a business book or an article to discuss with our peers. The idea was to get us to understand how we could all read the same text and yet interpret it differently. Two hours were aside aside every week to meet and discuss the readings, in a parliament style. It was an exercise to build our listening, analyzing and speaking skills. Initially, it was hard for EITs like me. I would jump in immediately I disagreed with something someone said. The senior faculty would eye me from her corner and make a note of that behavior *face palm*. By the second semester, we had all (or most of us) built the communication skills we needed to make an argument, to influence other parties and to say “I am wrong, you are right”.

Now here was the hard part. We started with HTML/CSS, SQL and databases, then Php, then Java/J2ME, then Perl and then there was a crash course on content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla. That foundation set us all up well to work on various ideas for our capstones. Some dived into Ruby, Python, Django….for me I had reached my limit! On top of these technical skills, the one thing I learned at MEST which has been super helpful throughout my personal and professional life has been how to find answers to my questions. One of our fellows, trained us on how to maneuver the web and find answers to any questions we may have. I can’t thank her enough. I have been sustained over the years with this skill. Dive into the web, the answer is right there, somewhere!