#JustStart your GOALS!
Hello everyone! I’m a mechanical engineering undergraduate student at NED University of Engineering & Technology. I’ve recently completed my 4 weeks internship period at International Industries Ltd. which is Pakistan’s largest steel pipes and tubes manufacturing industry.
At IIL, there was a building called Production Office where all the engineers work on their laptops/PC. The day I entered the office, I noticed everyone working on 2 things mainly i.e. MS Excel and ORACLE. I was quite surprised that why are they using MS Excel? They were making daily production reports, entering Maintenance data, and all that stuff. I thought they might be working on software like AutoCAD, SolidWorks but what I saw there was completely different. This is when I realized that;
“You cannot excel in life if you don’t know MS Excel.”
So, from today, dated 3rd April, I’ve started my journey of learning MS Excel and would like to share it with you all.
If you ask me why do you have this goal, then I would like to share a story from my internship at IIL. During my internship period, I was given a project that needed the use of Excel and I suffered a lot during that. The project was to analyze the Production Downtime in the last 8 months due to Maintenance problems using MS Excel. The project was easy, just entering the data and then applying filters and creating pie-charts, bar-charts, etc. Anyone who is proficient in Excel can do this within an hour but it took me one whole week to get this done. The main reason was that I didn’t even know the basics of excel. I didn’t know how to apply filters, how to get your desired graphical data. So now, I’ve included this in my goals to learn MS Excel to an advanced level as it is very important in professional life.
But this wasn’t the first time that I started learning MS Excel. I’ve tried once last year, just because my elder siblings advised me to do so. But I didn’t continue after 2–3 days. There were no hard challenges that I faced in the past when I started learning, but I just didn’t know the significance of this so I left it after 2–3 days.
But this time, it was different, way better than before. Because this time, I was sure that this thing is not going to waste my time. This thing is going to help me so much at so many places that I can’t even count.
The experience of learning excel this time was good but very challenging for me. With my tough university schedule, tuition, and my online course of Amal Career-Prep Fellowship, it was very difficult for me to get time for this.
But in this challenging week, I learned one thing, i.e. it is a lot easier to stay focused on your goal if you convert your simple goal into SMART goal. If I had told myself that I will learn MS Excel, maybe I would have skipped this week due to tough schedule. But since I’ve converted this into my SMART Goal and according to my SMART Goal it is “I will watch one tutorial of MS Excel every day” so now I cannot skip it. Because it always motivates me that come on Anas, it’s only one tutorial, YOU CAN DO THIS!
My next step in this journey is to practice whatever commands I’ve learned during this week. I will try to find dummy data from internet and practice those commands on that data.
The End :)
