The Symantec Service Corps Turkey team has returned from their month-long pro bono assignment, and is settling back in to their roles at Symantec. Here, Shantanu Gattani, one of the participants, shares his final reflections on his experience.
Symantec Service Corps (SSC) 2015 has been officially over for a few weeks now, and the team is back in their respective homes. As I reflect on my time in Turkey, I find myself missing the entire SSC family. I also realize that this journey taught me a number of important lessons.
SSC has been a memorable journey of hard work, new relationships, and self-discovery, with a healthy dose of fun. It has taught me to live outside of myself in several ways and how incredibly satisfying it can be. I was happy to be part of an incredible team working for, Doga Dernegi, the Nature Society of Turkey. In one short month we were able to deliver on Doga’s need for sustainable logistics management, marketing plans and fundraising strategies. Our clients were excited and grateful for the outcome and even yesterday I received an email from a contact there, saying how glad she was to have us in their office. This brings me to my first reflection –the journey to success will likely be hard, but it does not have to be long!
Before I set out for Turkey, I wrote that I had trepidations. Trepidations that I might not be able to give as much. Even then a friend of mine told me to throw trepidation out the window because just our presence would make a difference! How right she was. Though I feel extremely enriched by this experience, I feel – no, I know – that we have all made a lasting impact for our clients. And this is because we were all singularly motivated.
We all came in to work on projects which we knew almost nothing about. We were grouped into sub-teams with a variety of skills. We all had the same uncertain butterflies in our stomachs, even the second week in. But we all knew that we wanted to complete what we came here to do. We did, and we did it well! And we did it while having fun and more fun. So my second and third lessons – a motivated team can solve any problem, no matter how hard it may seem at the outset. And we must always build for change. Nothing that we make will stay the same. Some will change in a few years and some in millenia. So why fight it!
If you’ve been reading our blog, our first two weeks in Turkey were spent getting to know each other, the city and culture we were in. We found out more about our clients, their mission and our respective projects. But up until the very last day we were learning something new, whether it was about our clients or our SSC team. We all shared stories of our lives and what brought us to where we are. We also learned about where we all want and hope to be. I realized how important it is to listen, learn, see and feel. It seems obvious, but I realized that I don’t do enough of these. Also everything we say and do, no matter how trivial, makes a difference– so we must weigh each thing carefully.
Lastly, make happy memories– those will last a lifetime at least, Even though we all have tried to chronicle our time in Turkey on this blog, there are things that just cannot be captured. How do we know that we succeeded in our work ? The expressions on the faces of our clients when we made our final presentations. The emotions in the room and the tears in the eyes. For a month we worked, played, ate, drank and danced together. We thought that work would be hard, but the goodbyes were the hardest. I definitely lost control of my emotions as did most of us. Even though right now it seems that there will be always be something missing, I am sure that the memories we made together will be able to fill the gap.
I got so much more than what I hoped for when I set out on this journey.
Related links:
- Travel Log Turkey: Welcome to Ankara
- Travel Log Turkey: Teamwork in action
- Travel Log Turkey: Long-term solutions in four short weeks
- Travel Log Turkey: Cross-culture opportunities
- Announcing the Symantec Service Corp volunteer partners
- Introducing the Symantec Service Corps Turkey team
Shantanu Gattani is Symantec's Principal Software Engineer