One fine day, somewhere in September, zulaika, ally, shafiq and I had involuntarily placed in a group to participate this one poster competition, apparently hosted by The Star newspaper. Being the lazy us, we delayed it until the very last minute, and later sat together at some coffee shop in Sunway Putra Mall and discussed everything.

Truth be told, none of us really knew what to do. I didnt participated the briefing talk because I was in a chess competition while my other friends didnt really paid that much attention in the lecture held by The Star. Couldnt blame them tho, it sounded boring. 

Anyway, we managed to come up with something and eventually the poster was sent to the star. After that, we didnt think much about it because, well, who knew we would go this far when we literally discussed everything in a short span of time, and zulaikha (with her amazing photoshop skill) went ahead and did the poster in like- a day. Yep, we procrastinated soo much that we made the poster a day before it was supposed to be submitted. 

Weeks later, Pn. Asiah came to us and said the poster was in the top 6. We had also won the merit award (got 25/20 rm kfc voucher) and we had to do a skype interview session later on friday that week. We prepared for it, zul n i came to school at nights to do preliminary preparations (which were not really useful)

During the interview, of course, all of us were freaking out. None of us had ever done this interview thing. We did it in the pc room at school, with pn asiah and pn khairiah monitoring us on projector, careful enough not to be seen in the camera. So we sat, waited for the call and alas, a star representative came up on the screen and introduced herself. 

Our legs were literally shaking under the table, and i was momentarily grateful that she couldnt see us fixating in our seats cus mayn, my heart couldnt beat any faster. She asked a few short questions which I couldnt recall, and fortunately, we managed to answer them quite well. If anyone whos reading this is thinking about participating this contest later, please note that the interviewers wanted to see 1. how well can u communicate in english and 2. ur team work. 

So, help ur team mates, like what we did is, i noticed my friend Ally, didnt speak much during the interview so i asked him like "ally tell us more abt badminton" that sort of stuff and with that, each of us managed to have the same amount of points to talk abt during the interview.

Me n zul tot we did really bad and we were really sad after the interview ended. REAL sad. we went ahead n book a grab car right after everything was over, and bought ourselves nutella cakes at secret recipe while going on n on abt how bad we were during the interview.

much to our surprise, we ended up in the top 3!! the interview was a success and we were qualified for the final round. which was the most dreadful thing ever- to present our poster, with a powerpoint and a 1 min video about it in front of a large audience.




This is where i messed up, i asked the star representative whether we were given a time limit and she said theres no time limit. so for the questions asked after our presentation, i was too carried away and i said unnecessary stuff that made our presentation too long and apparently the judges didnt like it. We did great tho during the presentation, no stuttering, made the audience laughed, and finished it in 5 mins (the time limit).

I remember scanning the audience while i was talking and saw cikgu azlan. He gave me a convincing nod and after we ended our powerpoint presentation. He was the one who clapped the loudest. Shout out to puan leela, who came to see us to give moral support and I thought it was the most thoughtful deed ever.

After they announced the winner, a principal of some school i didnt remember came to one of my friend and told us "You didnt won the first place, but you guys won a place in my heart." Yep, we did that good. and a star representative came to me and said "Asal u guys tak menang?? Haihh.. patutnya menang.. takpelah try again" (unfortunately were in form 5 alrdy)





We ended up in the second place. Its not that bad, we got a 1000 sen heng voucher each, 50 ringgit kfc voucher each and we were on the newspaper 2 times lol. After all, we didnt won the judges but we won the audience. Its all about the experience we gained, a valuable one for sure.

Thanks for reading. Hope it benefits you in some way.