You Belong Here!

If I have to sum up the highlights(which are many) of my phenomenal experience of our recently concluded TOC retreat at Shoolini University , I will need multiple posts, So, I will start by encapsulating my highlights from the first evening itself(followed by subsequent posts) where-in the entire cohort of 49 TOCians were meeting each other in-person for the first time but not for any planned First Timers session, we never thought it would be necessary and it sure was not!

Within the first 30 mins the entire cohort who were strangers and a little skeptical till that time of what lay ahead of them , started making efforts to know each other not by exchanging business cards but by grooving to Himachali dance steps, trying to synchronise, singing or just chatting up with each other without ever having the need of exchanging business cards. That for me was the first validation of our idea of setting up TOC!

The next highlight came immediately after Dinner the same night, it was about 10 PM and we were all supposed to head to our rooms to sleep but what really transpired was a night full of invigorating & non-stop conversations covering all things education amongst TOCians coming from different backgrounds and regions. We discussed, International Education, University Admissions trends, Career Counselling Practices, vented our frustrations, our dreams, our vulnerabilities as effortlessly to each other as we do with our closest friends and families and this was a group of close to 30.

Over the next 2 days, I had many highlights which I will share in my subsequent posts and reflections of the retreat but I think the first night set the tempo for what was to follow over the next 2 day which was to be a truly memorable and a special retreat for not only me and Bhakti Shah as Founders but also more importantly the retreat was to become a milestone in our 8 month long journey as a community.

Whenever the history is written on the story of birth of TOC this retreat and the 49 TOCians that participated in it will be an integral part of the same. I am generally the first one to sum up my emotions in a social media post but that it has taken me over a week to just process my emotions and start reflecting on my experience at the retreat gives you a signal of how deeply touched personally I am from what I experienced. So, thank you TOCians and Team Shoolini for giving us this memorable experience and giving birth to this special community of passionate, committed and collaborative professionals of go-getters!

Atul Khosla Avnee Gupta Shikha Sood Vinmre Kaushal Ankit G. Anjali Uppal Anju Jayraj Avinav Sharma Alpana Kedia Anu Arora Archana Mehta Aashima S. Bharat Bhardwaj Charushilla Narula Dr. Rohit Rastogi Deep Mala Chowdhury Devesh Lathi Ganesh Rathinam Srividya Iyer Saurabh Nanda Johnson Odakkal Himanshu Dev Priyanka Roy Harish Menon Deepak Tyagi Sakshi Mittal Bhavya Goyal Pranjal Choudhary Ambika Vasudev Rajeev Mishra Afsha Aziz Preetika Sharma Swagat Yadav Dhaval Gandhi Tanya Dhawan Sanjay Dhingra Manas Dowlani Akshay Jain Niraj Harlalka Navya Mehta Hardik Gupta Nirav Patel Bijoy Laxmi Prasad Harshita Sharma Denny Mathew Priyank Sharma Dr.Suman Trivedi Megha Srivastav Sumeet . Dr. Samir Karkhanis