Petronas Youngstars Day 2018 (PESP)

Hello friends and fellow readers :) Yes it's been a long long time, if you've been following my posts. 

Today, I'm going to talk about my experience during Petronas Youngstars Day 2018. This year, they had it in West Malaysia for a period of four days, 23 to 27 April, and at another two locations in Sabah and Sarawak each. My session is 23rd of April, the first day, also yesterday. It was held at KDU University College, Shah Alam. 

According to the facilitator, there were up to 8000 people who applied for this programme and only around 1000 people received the invitation. I'm truly glad to be one of them. 

The helpers, a.k.a. our potential future seniors, started leading us into the hall starting from 7.20am, separating us from our parents. We were separated from our parents the entire day after that. The breakfast area is only provided for the parents, as breakfast is also provided for us but in packages.

I found myself sitting between a Malay girl and an Indian girl, with the names Aini and Keshika. Keshika told me that if I were to write a blog please do make it straightforward because readers only want to know what happened in the event instead of what happened to me during the event. Regardless of my feelings, I do think she's right, therefore I'll go straight through the process. 

There's no such thing as boys sitting on the left and girls sitting on the right, by the way. There were so many people they could not afford any spaces between anyone. So once we were in, we were with the people beside us until we went out. 

7.30am. 

They started calling us out four by four into each registration counter, and that was when we gave them our original documents and ctc documents. 

The original documents would be returned after phase 1, and the ctc documents, may I remind you, should be signed or stamped by concerned authorities. 

After registration, I settled down and started to get to know the people sitting beside me. People came from as far as Penang, and it was amazing to see how much they could sacrifice for this programme. 

After some briefing from the facilitator, we went to the nearby computer labs to take our CPSQ and TSA tests. 

CPSQ took about 45 minutes of constant clicking while TSA took an hour and a half of constant thinking. :p

However, don't worry because everything is already in your brain. I know many of you would try to prepare for it but I think you don't need to. But go on if you like. TSA consists of 40 questions, by the way. 

TSA was kind of hard because it took us a lot of thinking, but in the end, 90 percent of all us passed the first phase, which broke the past year records of 30 to 60 percent. 

We went back to the hall for lunch and to wait for results which would be out at 1pm. Lunch was pretty good except for the chicken which was a little uncooked near the bone parts. It happened to both me and my friend Aini by the way. I'm secretly hoping PESP people would see this post so that they know about this, but I also hope they won't get offended. 

The people there were very friendly and I got used to the environment quite quickly. It was at lunch time that they gave our original documents back to us. My friend had incomplete documents and thus will have to send the missing documents to some lady before 4th May. Don't worry, she wasn't refused from entering the programme because of this. Some of us even got our documents back at 8.15pm as there were a lot of us to sort through.

The moment when the results for phase 1 came out was heart clenching for all of us. First, we saw Keshika's name, then Aini's and finally mine. It was a miracle that all three of us passed. Even more a miracle when we got to know that this is the first time that 90 percent of us passed the tests in phase 1. 

Because there were too many of us, instead of separating us into two groups of 15 teams, we were separated into two groups of 15 teams and another extra one group of around 4 or 5 teams. 

People who stayed in Penang or Perak, faraway places had trains to catch and therefore could not afford to be in the third group whose session is 6 to 8pm. Therefore the facilitator had to ask favors of those in the first group who stayed in the state of Selangor to sacrifice their seats for those who need them. 

1st group's session was for 2pm to 4pm, while the 2nd group's session was for 4pm to 6pm. I was sorted into the third group.

This is only group 2. Imagine the crowd with group 1 added in

It happened that we were brought into the lecture theatre along with the 2nd group, but we could only watch them as they received their individual study case and group study case, for we were way too far from them and can't see anything.  

The people in my team were all quite friendly and cool. Amir, Irfan, Farah and Afiqah, they were called. We chatted around until we fell silent naturally, and just waited for our fate. 

Irfan on the left and Amir on the right

Around 6.00pm, I was woken up when apparently they were finally giving out the questions. According to the few posts I've seen throughout the web, the study case that was given to us was the same study case for certain previous years, especially last year. I didn't know this until just now, of course, which means I did lose a chance of preparing it, but it's alright.

The question given was - What can we do to increase Mesra sales?

Even one of my friends mentioned it before the question was given to us. Indeed, none of us expected it to come out, even if our potential future seniors themselves told us they couldn't tell us what they received last year for it was the same question.

Our potential future seniors

Apparently it's supposed to be private and confidential,  but now that I see the same question repeated in a few of the blogs I saw, with the difference of just some additional questions to it, I think we may safely assume that all the study cases in the future would revolve around this topic - how to improve Petronas and help them increase profit.

I know that usually everyone would be quiet and write down their own points,  hoping it wouldn't clash with each others', but for my team, we were all extraordinarily willing to help each other. Probably mostly because we were motivated to do so after the speech of "Just speak up, there's no right or wrong" and "Fight, but don't kill each other" by the facilitators. It was quite a surprise to see that our main ideas weren't clashing at all.

The entire hall was emptied save for three more groups as we left the hall.

We were finally led into our interview rooms at 6.30pm. The interviewers actually looked quite tired, but you've got to salute them when they sorted themselves within a few seconds and gave us their welcoming faces again. 

Greetings were exchanged and as we sat down, the interview started. There were five minutes allocated to each person. In my team, we had already sorted out our talking turns and therefore there were no conflicts when the interviewer asked us who would talk first. Amir, who was the leading type, was first naturally, and Farah who volunteered to be next was second. I was the third, Irfan the fourth and Afiqah the fifth. I would say that the individual interview was quite fine,  as you could see the interviewers nod their heads at our presentation and their eyes shining at certain moments. 

Then came the team discussion, 30 minutes and team presentation, 15 minutes. It was mostly just combining our ideas into a big strategy. However, awkwardness befell us when they kept watching how we communicate, and thus the real communicating was a bit slowed down. 

So don't be nervous, whatever you do. 

My team decided to cut down the points into the best ones, while I myself personally think that we should have combined all of them, but indeed what they say was right in a sense, and therefore I agreed with them.

During the discussion, my friend Farah asked to take down one of my points, and although I felt like one subset of it should be kept, I stayed silent because it wasn't really important. Everything was alright until both of the interviewers looked at me intently and one of them asked me whether I was okay with it. I realized then, that they were looking out for my reaction and I kept wondering which reaction would be what they want. Therefore I finally voiced up about the tiny little thing and the point was accepted back. I don't know whether the interviewers were satisfied but at least they didn't stare at me again. 

Finally everything was settled and we started our group presentation. When even that was done, the interviewers told us, "Thanks for taking your time, it's already 8 something." We gave out half laughs as we didn't know whether it was meant as a joke. 

Then one of them told us that we should have learned something from today, and we all nodded our heads and said thank you.

After shaking hands and saying farewell, we all went downstairs, took some pictures and went home. Altogether it was a fruitful day as I went through my first interview in my life.

If you were to have the interview yesterday, today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, next year or the years after next year, good luck to you and may the odds be ever in your favour!