Hello everybody! I’m Alessia, one of the two people responsible for the group 9 “The job and job hunting” and I would like to talk about the experience of this project of the past two months.
I’m pretty sure that this coronavirus pandemic cancelled all our plans, like the opportunity of going to Japan and studying in a different environment, talking Japanese all the time and improve language skills. Indeed, this project was a useful replacement for this purpose. I mean, it’s not the same cause we are still in Italy, but at the same time we had the opportunity to interact with Japanese people about topic non so usual in a daily conversation.  Reading and talking with other group members I had the possibility to discover new point of view about job or –in my case- about welfare. So thanks to this, I learnt a lot of information. It’s also kind of strange because I was able to ascertain that Japan and Italy are kind of different but at the same time also similar, like of course the divergent way of working (like not doing a lot of overworking in Italy that is totally impossible in Japan) but at the same time it’s kind of reassuring that almost of the people of my ages are feeling lost and don’t know what job they want to do in the future, like we’re all on the same boat.
I consider the topic that was assigned to our group interesting but also challenging in many ways. In fact, the topic is very broad, but at the same time we had to choose an interesting weekly sub-theme that did not overlap with the one chosen by a group having a quite similar to ours. So in that sense, as I lacked on original ideas for the sub-theme, choosing a different one every week was challenging. Furthermore, what I consider to be a negative aspect of this project is exactly the fact that we had to stick to one theme for the whole 8 weeks. Of course I am aware of the upside of such limit, as sticking to one argument may improve one’s vocabulary in that field. However I felt as if my group was a bit strained by the continuous talking and researching on the same subject.
In my opinion, the most interesting part of this project was the weekly zoom meeting and the conversation lesson with the students. As I said, exchanging opinions with the Japanese or with guys a little younger than me, was useful and not only as a language exercise, but also to open the mind to new horizons.
The blog part was also quite fascinating because I had the opportunity of reading a lot of excellent articles about many intriguing topic, however the obligation on the numbers of comments to be made I think that limited the spontaneous part of the blog. In the sense that having a fixed number of comment that need to be reached per week made the commenting process feel like homework rather than an action based on genuine interest. Another irksome part, for me, was the use of Slack. Maybe chatting only about the work life has not contributed to creating a sense of complicity and real friendship between the members of the group, so as not to be able to talk about events of our daily life. Also the app has been seen more as something related to the project than a real chat and therefore mainly used to notify something.
In conclusion, as per my general impressions on this project I can definitely say that it helped growing my Japanese skills, but above all it refined my leadership skills which I did not even know to possess. For sure this project took a lot of time and effort but I must say that was quite a nice experience.