Part 1, the prologue, can be found here.

The actual day
I didn’t get much sleep as I was either excited about the conference, or just about graduating in particular.

Anyways, we headed over to the National Volunteer & Philanthropic Centre (NVPC), heard the opening speech from Mr Gerard Ee (The new CEO of NKF after Durai), and it was time for the presentations.

There is so much to say, but I’ll just make it short. I was amazed at some of the stuff I saw. Some of them were really well thought out, some posters were really well done, and some of the videos I’ve seen really touched me and I would remember it for some time to come.

Finally though, it was our turn. It didn’t help that the President of BMDP (Ms Jane Prior) came in a few minutes before we presented, together with two other people from BMDP, it adds up to three. Only one of them was present initially for the full-time student’s presentation, so that really adds up to the pressure.

Even though I didn’t had to present on that day, I was involved in the ‘gimmick’ that I thought of at the last moment, and even though all I had to do was to show the thumbs up, smile and the ‘twist’ (heh, I actually made that all up by myself to break the monotony). It didn’t help that one of our members took too long for his part, and the other two had to rush. But all in all, I think we did pretty well.

As we were the second last group in the morning’s presentation, we stayed behind for the last group’s before we headed for lunch and a couple of drinks.

Fast forward to 7pm to the closing ceremony when it was time to announce the prizes. 5 gals and a guy from the afternoon session was given an honorable mention, and then it was time for the winners to be announced.

I tell you, even though we talked and joked about winning it, we never really expected to win. So when our group’s name was announced. We were pretty shocked and stunned for a few seconds, before we started congratulating each other “like it was the Grammies” I quote a friend. I suppose we were pretty dramatic, all four of us who were still there at that time.

We were then followed by the Earthlings who worked with Habitat for Humanity. Lionel is actually my good friend, and he happens to be the team leader for this group. Heh, our groups actually congratulated each other on stage and it was pretty dramatic I suppose.

Oh yea, the winning teams actually got $300 cash each from XPR. For your information, XPR is named one of Singapore’s Top 10 agencies in the Marketing Magazine 2009 Agency Of The Year Awards. The judges Adrian Lee (director) was really nice to us and gave us constructive criticism which really hit the spot. The organizations of the winning teams also got $1,000 in cash as seed funding for the campaign. The $1,000 was actually raised by the students (and lecturer), and matched dollar for dollar by SMa.

Considering though, that we spent quite a bit on the collaterals that we’ve made… I’m glad we had this money to spare

Some of us then had dinner at Manhattan Fish market (its strange how I only asked one person, but that person asked another, and soon there were 15 of us). It was really a lively dinner even though everyone was tired, and I guess we’re really glad everything ended when it did.

Or was it? The winners had to head to Live 93.8 the following day for a ‘live’ interview in “The Living Room” with Stanley Leong and Pamela Ho.. It was bittersweet, to have the decision to think about whether to head on down despite all that has happened, but clearly the opportunity to be on Live radio won in the end.

But that’s a blog entry for another day~

Stay tuned for more exciting updates!

Random pictures taken on that day:
Yamuna and Melvin. I’ve never seen her smile (or beam) that much before ever! Note the eye bags.. we must have all looked like zombies. Heh.

Alyssa, Zhong Qiong and Lionel~

And this is the envelope handed out to the winning teams!

More random pictures can be found here.