UoN Innovation Fellowship is both magnificent and mind blowing; a Fellow’s perspective.
- Lawrence
- January 20, 2020
- Fellowship
- 0 Comments
By Sonia Barasa
The Innovation Fellowship program with the C4DLAB is an absolutely amazing opportunity to learn so many exciting lessons at once. The experience so far has been both magnificent and mind blowing, getting to learn so many insightful things about myself, especially my personality, becoming more aware of the person I am, while learning to express myself more boldly and clearly without fear.
It’s a platform that for me has come in handy at a time when I need to build my soft skills more so on communication, creativity, critical thinking and collaboration.
Being an Innovation Fellow in the PBL program is itself an opportunity to interact with a diverse lot of multi-disciplinary set of individuals, comprising of people with absolutely different set of skills and training background. Thus far I have learnt to not only work well in such a diverse set of a team, but also challenge myself to work extremely hard on improving how I utilize my God given talents to unleash my full potential as an individual.
To be sincere, this is the only place you get to push yourself to give solutions to real life challenges; those that affect the society and people directly in one way or another.
My most intriguing part of the journey is getting to learn the Design Thinking process, something that has given me a completely different perspective on varied number of things. The journey has literally aroused my curiosity on several things; and I believe it is somewhat leading me to a path of innovation.
I have a plethora of words that I could perhaps use to describe how I feel about the program; and I can confidently affirm that I am elated, exuberated and eager to explore my potential to the fullest ,deleting and dropping everything that might be holding me back to limit me from being Who I was created to be.
The meeting on the 13th Dec, 2019 was more like an eye opener to me. Listening to the presentations by various teams was very enlightening. Each of the teams expressed their understanding of the challenges more boldly and confidently this time; an indication that the program continues to be a great platform to learn all the necessary 21st century skills.
It goes without saying that indeed the C4Dlab fraternity including the mentors and faculty are imparting positively to the fellows whose lives are practically being transformed. I am challenged to work harder on improving my communication and relation with others; and I promise myself to do this and more. I am more than elated to be part of this adventure!
(Sonia Barasa is a graduate student at the University of Nairobi and a 2019/2020 Innovation Fellow at the C4DLab. email:
achieng.barasa@students.uonbi.ac.ke)
