A few years ago, I was introduced P90x and it made a huge impact on my life. Over the next few years, I found myself gradually getting more occupied with other things and fitness took a back seat. I tried to keep up with some workout videos but felt myself losing motivation, often giving up within a week. Sticking to a workout regime felt like a struggle and it was a stark difference from the time that I had originally started working out.

In January, while preparing for a family trip my dad jokingly said “I don’t want to take a fat guy back to India” and as such I didn’t have much of a choice. But, I was determined to show what I could do and I knew what I had to do. Here is my journey for the past few months on how I went about doing it and perhaps inspire a few people in the process.

Program

First of all, I didn’t do the entire P90x program, since I had already done it before. Instead, I decided to work out 3 to 5 times per week. Then something beautiful happened, within only a couple of weeks, I started noticing a huge difference in my body. What I didn’t realize was that when I did P90x for the first time, I created a really good physique that never quite went away. So while toning back down, I saw progress that I would typically not have seen until a month or two later. Within a month, I looked like this. After a few weeks of 3 to 5 workout sessions per week, I did something that had been my dream for a long time.

I had always wanted to do martial arts before I graduated from University. By a chance encounter, I was in the Student life center while registrations were being taken in for a Muay Thai club. I didn’t think twice and it was probably one of the best decisions I made this term. Before joining Muay Thai at Waterloo, I was terrified of getting into a physical fight. I always tried my best to stay away from even verbal confrontations. The reason was simple; I was afraid. The more I went to Muay Thai lessons, the less afraid I became. I believe that almost getting hit on your face or leg or chest somehow builds up this confidence in you. I am a lot less afraid now. Of course, I will always try to settle things by talking, but now I know how to defend myself a bit better if the need arises. In addition to P90x and Muay Thai, I played squash at least once per week and this was probably the most fun way to lose calories this term. To summarize, every week involved 3-5 P90x workout sessions, one 1.5 hr. session of Muay Thai and one 1 hr. session of squash. I continued this for all 13 weeks of this term.

Stuff I used

My entire P90x workout was done in my basement. I stuck to the same routine I did for the first time. I used resistance bands and detergent liquid as substitutes for weights. I used chairs for push-ups and hung from the wooden I-beam in the ceiling for pull-ups.

For Muay Thai, I purchased a pink color (that’s right!) hand wraps

and used gloves, along with pads and a punching bag from the dojo. For Squash, I used a 30$ worn out racket that I purchased 3 years ago.

Food

I made sure to drink 1 glass of milk after every workout and tried to limit the consumption of restaurant or retail food to a minimum of 2 to 4 times per week. I tried following a Keto diet( low carbs and high fat) for a couple days and immediately decided it wasn’t for me as my main food consumption was what was made at home (which usually involved roti, rice and bread – three big NO’s for Keto). So I decided to stick with whatever was made at home and simply watch the quantity of food I was eating. I drank lots and lots of water, which really helped keep my appetite in check. What I found tremendously useful was my calorie-tracking app MyFitnessPal. I used it religiously to track all my food intake and exercise. They have quite an extensive database for their food and even options for Indian dishes. This ended up being a huge motivator whenever I got off track. I basically set a net calorie intake of 1400 which, as I realized much later, was really low. However, at the time I didn’t feel sick or weak at any point so I stuck to it. Food is one area I definitely need to keep working on.

 What’s next?

I am going to be travelling to India and certain parts of South Asia and it’s going to be really hard to keep up my routine. Nevertheless I am going to do my best to keep eating healthy, drink tons of water and try getting in a workout at least couple times per week. I absolutely want to join a Martial Arts club and maybe even a hip hop dance club after I come back.

 Closing thoughts

The more you do it, the easier it becomes. Starting out is the hardest part, so your objective should be to simply show up again and again. No matter what! You got this!

1. Value: Beyond the dollar
2. Satellite in the Shed
3. Exploring the Canadian Artic
4. I Spy

1. Value: Beyond the dollar

The purpose of this exhibit is to get the visitors to think about the value of items as something more than money. This is done by looking at emerging economic practices,  thinking about ideas as currency, looking at the value of free inspiration and knowledge such as TED talks, MIT open courseware and lastly, how we can take part in collaborative consumption on services such as cars ( zipcar), housing (airbnb), cycle (FreeCycle).

I really enjoyed using the iPad drawing app to learn about creative commons and its usage, I felt this was a great way to learn. I will be sure to Google more information on the collaborative consumption. Visually, I thought posing the questions of uses of trees as a blackboard was a good idea but, I was a bit confused to the purpose of the visually pleasing Keystone XL pipeline .

2. DIY

The DIY( Do it Yourself) exhibition looked at how DIY is affecting our resilience and our world by using simple homemade projects such as the makeshift stationary cycle , simple ways to exercise by everyday objects around you( I am a huge fan of this because, I am currently working out from my home and I truly think you only need 2 things to get fit – your willpower and gravity), making your own kitchenware , solar usb charger and make your own controllers .

I was very impressed with the aesthetics and the user experience and the variety of artifacts on display. The DIY group not only talked about DIY but, actually went out and built some amazing concepts and artifacts to show to the users that it is simple enough that more people can do it. Also, I really loved their use of the DIY timeline feature which was presented close towards the end of the exhibition.

3. Exploring the Canadian Artic

This exhibition takes its visitors back in time to join a historic arctic expedition and relive the trials and triumphs of its explorers. Though the exhibition started out with a lot of monotone color walls and signage, I was pleasantly surprised by its sheer amount of awesome artifacts that the group had acquired for its exhibition. Items such as the old chest, the bear skin , really old sign posts all made me feel like I was part of a film set.

Also, this exhibit was the only one that made the activity seem like a choice by using its signpost to divide the experience. By taking the left route, its visitors would have experienced the Alaskan journey and by taking the right, visitors would have experienced the Karluk journey. Another thing, the team did very well was to use the green color stickers for entrance and the red color tape to denote its entrance and exit.

4. I spy

The I Spy exhibit explored the possibilities of identifying possible security threats around us, when we should take action and when we should hand it to the proper authorities and in general how to keep our surroundings safe. The exhibit went a bit further and explored how average citizens can become citizen spies and reveal possible security threats in our everyday life.

I was impressed with this exhibit use of typography, use of mannequins and the timeline feature as it helped me visualize easily. When I came to this slide asking have you spotted the security threats, I immediately stopped and started looking around nervously. The interrogation room was actually very eerie looking and made me realize how the real life interrogation would feel.

Closing thoughts and overall impressions

The exhibitions this year have really taken it to the next level in terms of user engagement, learning outcomes and just pure visual aesthetics. For the first time, I had the feeling that I was actually someplace else while being part of the Arctic exhibition, the interrogation room feeling in the citizen spy exhibit, the iPad engagement app to learn about creative commons and the various DIY activities especially using everyday objects to create an exercise for yourself was very well done. Great job to the team and everybody who made this exhibition awesome! You have definitely upped the standards yet again.

I would like to thank Robert, Peter, Jesse and Ali for their valuable inputs.

We wanted to build something that was in good harmony with how desirable it would be to look, how technically feasible it would be to make within the next couple days and how viable it would be for applying to full time jobs. We started the exercise by interviewing the key people who are often involved in the interview decision process – HR, Tech and Management. Dividing ourselves into 6 groups of 2 people each, we took turns in interviewing and taking notes with the Human resources department, the senior management team and the technical experts. After we all completed with the interview portion of the project, we got together later as a team to share our findings.

Some of the key insights gathered:
1. The first 1/3rd of your resume is the most important
2. Make a portfolio of your work to discuss during interviews
3. Never ever complain about your previous employer
4. Interviewers look more at your thinking process and process than the final answer
5. If you don’t know something or make mistake then don’t be afraid to own up to your mistakes
6. One can stand out from the rest of the crowd by doing simple gesture such as handwritten thank you cards

Having this as a starting point, I presented my resume, which I thought was quite well done to my mentor and after taking a quick glance she said this is good, but this is just like any other resume that I have seen. You got to get the reviewers attention right away and you got to be different. I took it as a challenge and started to rethink my entire resume. I started with the following questions: Who am I making this resume for? What do they want to see? How do I make my resume stand out from the rest of the long pile they have to go through? Asking myself the above questions, I identified that the first thing they will be looking for when viewing my resume is the work experience and second, whether I have the skills to do what the job description states.

In many cases, interviewers would review a resume for just about 10 seconds or less before tossing it aside. Therefore, I needed to make a good impression and needed to make it fast! Based on the previous findings and me having my background in a creative industry, I thought I would make my resume slightly different – a bit more visual and make it easier to find out the work experience and skills that they are looking for.

So, here is the first draft of the resume that I prototyped:

I identified three main sections to focus on in my resume – First is the pie chart that describes three main things about me placed to the top right of the resume. Second is the new and improved work experiences section that is redesigned in the form of a timeline, which I felt made it much easier to read what projects or work I was involved. Lastly is the tools section that is in the form of a progress bar that indicates how much knowledge and experience I have for the different tools.

I finally showed my first draft of the resume to my mentor and received a lot of positive feedback and felt like I was on to something.  So, with a few minor tweaks, I decided to prototype further and take it to the next stage: Creating a higher-fidelity mock-up of the resume. The next section of the article is going to focus on the three main areas of the resume – Pie chart, journey timeline and tool progress.

Pie chart
I recently started teaching myself illustrator and I have to say that I really enjoy using it. As it turns out, making a pie chart was quite simple using illustrator that I not only created a 2d version quite easily but, went further and created the 3d version of the pie chart as well in under 5 minutes. It’s that simple! Overall, the progress was a bit slow because, I was still a novice to illustrator but eventually I started getting the hang of things. Here is the pie-chart I ended up creating to showcase the three main segments of me that my previous employers have most commented on.

Journey
When I started using illustrator, I ran into a couple of problems with the timeline section of the resume, mainly with questions such as How do I represent a position when I have worked on multiple projects at the same time or how do I distinguish my volunteer experience and paid internships.

Upon looking online for inspiration and prototyping a couple more times in my notebook, I found an elegant solution to my problem – just indicate in the form of a label next to the project whether it was a volunteer or a paid internship position. In addition, I got the idea of using the start date and end date in the left section instead of just showing just the various months when I worked. The below image shows one of the early prototypes when I was brainstorming ways to incorporate the timeline, dates and information all in a nice and coherent manner.

Tools
Upon completion of the journey segment in the Illustrator, I went ahead and prototyped the progress bar of the tools I use for designing. The colors for the progress bar were picked directly from the original icon color of the tool’s logos thereby providing it with a unique visual appeal. I was quite happy with this progress and I felt like it showed a bit more precisely my familiarity and comfort level instead of just listing out the various tools. Find below the final mock-up of the tools section.

Coming together
After doing a couple of further iterations and getting more peer feedback, the resume finally started to feel like it was coming together. During the whole process, I was continually getting feedback from the original people that I had initially interviewed but,also ran it by people with various backgrounds and perspective in English, product management, quality and gathered very useful insights. But as user researchers, it is our duty to gather this all kinds of  user feedback and figure out the core insights from the interviews and prioritize them to make it fit within our constraints and then rapidly iterate through the life-cycle of the design.

Find below a screen shot of the finished v1.0 of the resume and scroll down below to download the pdf version.

You can view the pdf version of my resume here

Some final thoughts
This resume was made with the intended audience being a creative professional and so I am not sure how such a resume would work for non-designer professionals. In addition, a lot of companies use resume parser to grab information from the resume so, a text only resume is more ideal on those situations. I am still debating the use of this resume in all my future job searches but, for the time being it is a great addition to the resume portion of my website.

I had a lot of fun creating this resume as it allowed me to gain more experience in the design thinking methodology, a chance to learn illustrator and best of all to have a brand new cool resume to showcase to the world. It was a really cool gesture on the part of SAP to allocate time and resources to help its interns become more attractive for the job market. Kudos!

I want to give a big shout-out to my friend Sam Martey for his help in proofreading this article.

Empathy, in short, means the ability to feel what other people are feeling, be it happiness, sadness, concern, doubt, distress or drive. I have had the tendency to sense what the other people are going through by simply speaking to them or sometimes by just observing them. At first, I didn’t think much of it but later on I learned to use this to my advantage. From little things such as being a good friend to sensing what to do to please my teachers before being asked to do something and figuring out whom I can trust. It doesn’t always work otherwise it would be a super power. Just like everyone else, I make mistakes and occasionally I am completely wrong, however, overall, I think my empathy has made me a better person.

Who would have thought that the same empathy gives me a competitive EDGE at my workplace? Currently working as an interaction designer, part of my job is to talk to people about my designs “User Research” and figure out what are the user needs. I am a strong believer in the user research methodology for two reasons: First, it really helps validate your product designs, while understanding how your users interact with the product  and secondly, we are able to find usability issues to make our product even more easy to use and intuitive. While conducting user interviews, I am able to quickly able to empathize with the users and draw out their true intentions for the product. Granted the users are not always right, as Steve Jobs famously quoted. However, I think by asking the right questions, most often than not the users will bring about the real pain points in using your product, which when combined with your knowledge and experience, can help you build a much more delightful user experience.

In addition to the above, being empathetic allows me to understand the dynamics in the work environment better; my own limitations and that of my peers, identifying and avoiding conflicts before they get out of hand and earning the respect and cooperation from your co-workers so that we can collaborate and build something truly awesome.

One of the challenges that an empathic person faces is the ability to take a decision without any emotional attachment. Empathetic beings, as I choose to call myself, are often driven by emotion that at certain times it makes it very challenging to make tough decisions that directly affect someone. Despite its challenges, I truly believe that being an empathetic person helps me be good at my work, pursue my passions and be happy.

As Psychology Today states:

Empathy is strength, and an asset towards surviving and thriving in any environment. It promotes genuine curiosity about others, which facilitates a desire to teach and learn.

I am quite proud about this discovery. What is your EDGE?

When I heard the word “apphaus” for the first time, I definitely didn’t know what to expect. To find out more, I attended what was a very unusual job info session at Waterloo. By unusual I mean, not the typical “look how great our company is!” or “here is what we have achieved so far.” Instead, it started out with a low-tech social network interaction session between the attendees. I was there for only 30 to 40 minutes but, together with the other attendees, we managed to “chart” our interests via sticky notes, played “rock, paper, scissors” (I lost to the person who won the entire game, so I didn’t feel too bad then) and saw some hilarious video of suburban dad rappers taking their babies on a stroller made for a product called Recalls Plus that SAP recently launched. Need I say more?! I was SOLD at this point, even though I had convinced myself before this to only apply to jobs outside Canada for my last work term. I simply couldn’t resist the opportunity.

Fast forward a couple months and here I am at work, working for SAP’s apphaus team in Waterloo. So, what exactly does apphaus mean again? Apphaus is an SAP program that focuses on building consumer mobile apps headed by Sam Yen, owner of User Experience at SAP. They adhere strongly to the design thinking philosophy of Stanford’s Hasso Plattner School of Design (or commonly known as the d.school). Design thinking, simply put is practicing empathy, seeking inspiration from users, cherishing multidisciplinary teams (like me being a mechanical engineering and designing iPhone apps) and doing rapid iterations which goes well with the agile programming sprints of design, test, build and do it all again.

So, before I begin my first few week’s encounter, let me tell you. This is absolutely unlike any co-op position that I have ever held. The first week was primarily focused on team building, we played several games; from playing throw a sound ball, building a LEGO city while doing it in an agile fashion, visited the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) in Toronto for a scavenger hunt, to playing more sound ball game and finally, to understand our users better, we formed teams and interviewed each other of how our ideal work place environment would look like just for fun. I thought it would end there, but surprisingly; we were given a small budget to go and make these ideal workplaces come to life! And yes! We went and bought them from IKEA. The next day when we came to our office, the majority of what we had ordered was waiting for us to get started on. The whole of that next morning we built our own furniture that we ordered as a team.

While the first week was primarily focused for training on design thinking, sprint planning, and working together as a team, the second week was spent introducing us to our specific products and were trained on how to conduct user research, which is one of the main proponents of design thinking. And guess what, we put our new found knowledge of user research into action at the Toronto Blue Jays stadium (now commonly known as the Rogers center) where we interviewed a large range of fans for our project needs. Why the Jays stadium you might be wondering? We are working on building an iPhone sports related app and who better to do user research on other than from the hard-core fans from around the stadium before a game. Granted, the Jays are not doing very well these days but the fans we met were very enthusiastic to speak to us.

The Apphaus project at Waterloo consists of 3 teams of 4 people each (1 Designer and 3 developers) and our objective is to build an iPhone app from scratch within 90 days. One thing I forgot to mention is that, the majority of the team members have little or no experience building mobile applications. This means that the 90 days cover learning, user research, designing, learning to work together as a team (very similar to a start up environment) to develop both the front-end and backend of our applications which will be in an entirely new in-memory database called HANA. Let’s not forget we still have to get approved from the Apple AppStore. In short, the experience is like working in a start-up environment within a big enterprise, which is exactly what it is.

Nothing sums up the excitement as what they said to us on Day 1 of the product cycle:

Go!

“Part time student, full time dreamer” is my online tagline. I have received some great feedback and occasionally, a bit of on the side of caution from a few friends from “Isn’t that a wrong statement since you are a full time student”, and if you are a “full time dreamer” wouldn’t it  imply that you are not a doer? Both are very valid statement and I hope to maybe clear some things in the post.

I briefly talk about one of my favorite quotes in my About page by the late Tamil poet, Avvaiyar which says “Katrathu Kai Mann Alavu, Kallathathu Ulagalavu”  which when translated says “What you have learned in this world is a mere handful but, what you have yet to learn is the size of the world itself”.

How much ever we learn in this world, there are limitless other things to be learned. In this aspect we are forever students, forever dreamers trying to attain a tiny bit of knowledge one at a time.  Learning in my opinion never ceases to stop, learning is a life long journey. Hence, I am referring to myself as a Part time student of the world.

Additionally, even though I am currently a full time student, I spend a lot of my time in extra curricular activities, than my core courses. I strongly believe that we learn a quite a bit outside the classroom than from inside. The inside of the classroom is a mere direction on how to learn, the rest we do it by ourselves. The biggest thing, one can learn in higher education is to figure things out by ourselves and, ultimately the goal is to figure out how to live a happy and content life. At least  it is for me and of course to build awesome things.

The second part of  my tagline says “full time dreamer”. What I am referring to here is my mind that is constantly thinking about what is right, what  is wrong and how to continue doing the right and think of ways to improve upon the wrong. I do not usually get involved with something, but, when I am, I am 100% into it.

Nothing explains this better than this tweet of mine that I made during TEDxUW.

You know you are passionate about something if that’s the last thing in your mind for the day and the first thing the next morning #TEDxUW

— Sharath Sundar (@sharaths99) July 14, 2011

So, in an essence I am a dreamer, who dreams about the problem, who sometimes dreams the solution,who dreams about the way things are and finally dreams up a way to do things even better. And I, finally wake up in morning to do it.

Hence the phrase – “Part time student, full time dreamer”

Responses varying from “Thats cool – I love it” to “What’s that – Sure I will give a shot”  and the very occasional “That’s weird – I am not going to do that” are some of the things I hear when I go for a fist bump.

I recently met Asad at TEDxWaterloo, one of the lead organizers at TEDxQueens. Some of you may already know that I helped out with TEDxUW last year so, apart from having TEDx in common, I found out that we both fist bump when we meet people.

We started talking about why we do it and some of the people whom we have fist bumped and I thought I would make a slightly humorous post about it. So here we go:

1.    It’s cool, that’s why
2.    It’s much more sanitary than a handshake especially during winter and the flu seasons
3.    It is a great conversation starter
4.    It shows that you are friendly, bold and slightly crazy at the same time
5.    I tend to have sweaty palms
6.    Handshakes are so old school, time to stir things up for the newer generation
7.    Some famous people non- sports you might know – Obama and Dalai Lama love doing it
8.    Guess who people are going to remember?
9.    When you do it to old people, they feel part of your crowd. One elderly gentemen even told me that he feels a bit younger having done it.

Also, check out this hilarious video on fist bump etiquette

I had been pondering over a topic for the past several months: Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. I recently saw this great talk on intrinsic and extrinsic beauty and I immediately knew what I had to do next.

Motivation

I am usually a very extrinsically motivated person. Most people are motivated by various extrinsic reasons. For example, I look at cause and effect before I do anything. Is it worth my time? Is it for someone whom I care about? Another thing that greatly motivates me is the joy or satisfaction I see in someone whom I truly respect.

On the other hand, people are motivated for different extrinsic reasons such as money, ambition to name a few and there is absolutely nothing wrong with their motivations. But, I have encountered only one person in my life that portrays truly intrinsically motivated values.

I will be changing the person’s name to protect his true identity, but he is a truly remarkable individual that I have had the pleasure of knowing. Let’s call him Jeff.

First thing that anyone will notice about Jeff is that he is always super involved whether it comes to studies or extra-curricular. He is one of the busiest guys I know. He moves about constantly with a sense of purpose and direction. In the brief time that I’ve spent with him, I was able to notice how much of what he accomplishes is never known by people. The truth is, as far as I can see, only about 10% or less of what he did was actually noticed by others.

I asked him once, what drives you to do the things that you do? To which he replied “just the satisfaction of knowing that I did a good job.” I have seen people who do great things but always ask for recognition, if not at least yearn for it. It is perfectly alright to be so, most people are, but Jeff always did way more than what was required of him. And to the best of my knowledge, he never even mentioned it to anyone.

Just the feeling of being in complete harmony with oneself truly astounded me. When I asked him, don’t you want to let people know what you did, he replied “people who need to know will come to know.” And when he said that, he never stopped smiling.

Beauty

I have been a very empathetic person all my life. I have always “felt” what other people feel, “felt” what a good design should look like , and strongly “felt” the right from wrong.

So when I came across this TED talk by Richard Seymour on “How Beauty Feels”, it immediately had an impact on me. Richard states that most things in life are extrinsic beauty. Such things are viewed as great by some but not so great by others. For example, a Rolls Royce is viewed by some as the best car ever made while others simply don’t care much about cars.

But there are very few things in this world that are intrinsically beautiful and perceived as a great design, such that its very existence goes unnoticed and universally accepted. For instance, Richard gives the example of delayed dimming in car lights when you close the door, or the dimming of lights in the theater right before your movie begins. The feelings it creates is quite unique.

Feelings and intuition are shunned upon largely by logical thinking. And for good reason, I agree with it for the most part. But let’s think for a moment, how many really great things come out of group-think?

To quote Steve Jobs when a reporter asked him what kind of market research he had done for the iPhone, Jobs simply replied with a question of his own “What kind of market research did Alexander Graham Bell do before he came up with the telephone?”

Some things in life cannot be logically derived but, need to be truly felt.

I started fist bumping people a couple of years ago. One of the very first times I tried it was in a business meeting after having started my first venture, efficientLogix, through CBET(Center of Business Entrepreneurship and Technology). I remember my hands being a bit sweaty (an understatement, really!) right before my pitch – Hey! I was meeting some Venture Capitalists and I was very nervous about shaking their hands!

John, my mentor noticed how uneasy I was and gave me one of the best pep-talks I have had in a while. He told me three things that day which I still remember to date:

• First, write down all the things that you are nervous and afraid about before you do something big and ponder them carefully (you’ll notice you are worrying too much…sometimes).
• Secondly, never mind how you make a first impression on others, as long as you make it a memorable one.
• Finally, people are actually a lot more open minded than you think.

Hence, having been fuelled by his last two statements (don’t ask me how), I started my fist-bumping journey.

I have substituted my handshakes with fist-bumping for the past two years. I recognize the huge argument surrounding the professionalism of fist-bumping and one should always have a firm hand shake when they meet someone new and so on. However, I respectfully disagree! More than 95% of the people who I fist bump seem to have a positive reaction to it. Recently, I fist-bumped someone and he immediately said to me, “When you meet someone who introduces himself with a fist bump, he has a lot of guts since it can be perceived as juvenile or, hopefully, someone who really know what he is doing; a very approachable person”. You can guess what happened next. I have made some great friends and mentors just by fist-bumping.

In my role as the Marketing Director of TEDxUW 2011, I met with some really cool and important folks every week with Prashanth, TEDxUW chair. I used to greet every one of them with a fist bump and I remember Prashanth being a bit uneasy about that. On one such occasion, someone else present during this discussion responded on my behalf. His words were, “Who are people going to remember, someone who simply follow the norm or someone who dared to be different?”

Additionally, if I may, fist bumping can be thought of as something that creates an atmosphere of fun and friendliness even in a business type of setting. It did this for me when I was pitching for my first venture. It immediately opened up room for my confidence to shine and I saw hints of smiles right before I started my pitch. There is saying that goes something like: “some of the most important deals are actually done in the golf course rather than in a board room.” Why do you think that is?

Some people are so used to handshakes that they simply cannot think of doing anything else. Definitely use your judgement when it comes to deciding when to fist bump and when not to. However, feel free to express yourself a little. What started out as just for fun and curiosity has almost become my way of life and a ritual for meeting people and building new relationships. Sometimes, daring to dream and doing something different might just be worth the shot.

In my next post, I will talk about 9 reasons why I fist bump.

1. Interned at Desire2Learn as a Product Designer in the User Experience team. Worked on 6 awesome projects, one of the projects, an accessibility focused Color Picker tool was even featured in a magazine

2. Donated blood for the first time

3. Sponsored a child via World Vision. Received a hand written letter from my Sponsee. Isn’t he awesome?

4. Attended 2 conferences
a. CUTC - Canadian Undegraduate technology Conference: This was the first real conference I had attended in my life. This quite important because, it eventually led me to join TEDxUW

b. SHEN - Spiritual conference: Surprisingly a very interesting conference where I learned a great deal about spirituality

5. Hiked in Tobermory, swam in 8 degrees water and canoed in Wiarton, Tubed in elora and chilled in sauble beach and fought in a real life war simulation

6. Ran 10km twice. My previous best run distance was 8 km, so I was really psyched about this milestone

7. Read five novels, two non fiction and wrote four blog posts

8. Chilled and vacationed in Florida with 20+ family and friends. My first time in the United States and one of the most intense vacations of my life

9. Ranked number 3 in  Desire2Learn’s ping pong company ladder. One of the things that I really loved about Desire2Learn!

10. Inspired 3 people. One of the reasons I started this blog was to inspire people and was really glad to hear from folks who read my blog and started doing awesome stuff themselves

11. Finally, the one that I was most excited and proud about – Joining TEDxUW as the Marketing Director, to bring the first ever TED like conference to the University of Waterloo

That’s my Summer of 2011, Imagine 2012!