Writing Composition - Coach Assistant

Khai Tran

Dr. Christina Cedillo

Writing Composition 1301.01

October 9 2015

Coach Assistant

        When in Viet Nam, I was a coach assistant (CA) for a soft-skill course named Awake Your Power which is based on the book “7 habits of highly effective people” by Stephen R. Covey. The course entailed us to support and clearly inform the participants the concepts in the book as well as how to practice and use them effectively. I want to write about this community because of its importance for me and for the young generation in Viet Nam. CA helps me understand about the lives, mentality and challenges of the Vietnamese youth.

        CA is a group of people who mastered the course and had a desire to help new participants. Specifically, Ngo, the Quality Control Manager, stated: “CA acts as an advisor who first seeks to understand the participants’ problem then figures out how to solve the problems.” Briefly, Huynh, one of my former colleague, came up with a conclusion:  “CA is a bridge between the trainer and participants.” Actually, we assisted the participants to comprehend the ideas of the seven habits, ensuring that they would be able to apply them into their own lives. Moreover, we kept track of their progress towards their goals, gave feedback and encouraged them not to give up. On the contrary, we updated our participants to the trainer so that he could be aware of their situation and respond immediately.

        Most of our communication was mainly on Facebook where we had a group to share things and information. The information was usually informal announcements, news and activities to build up the team spirit. Furthermore, Facebook was a medium of CA to talk to participants. As Chi, the Project Manager, mentioned: “Most of participants use Facebook so it is easier to create a connection to them. Besides, we use Gmail for formal information and announcements.” Internet communication was especially useful, convenient and time saving because we were from different universities and different living areas.

In addition to online communication, we had a fixed meeting at our campus once a month and it usually happened on the first Saturday of the month. Our campus was a coffee shop, “Windmills”, which was a start-up project of some participants. When they decided to do it, they were only students who had just finished the course. Having no experience, they faced many challenges; however, they still tried their best. Lack of money made them do all of the construction by themselves such as designing the shop, decorating the wall, asking for investments and learning how to make coffee (Do). When it was finished, it made us so proud: not only because it was one the most popular coffee shop in Ho Chi Minh City, but because it showed that “the knowledge from the course can be applied into reality” (Huynh). As a gift for us who assisted them when they were in the course, they made us a distinguished working area where we could even stayed overnight to sleep when our works were overloaded. This place was where the meetings were set up too.