My main activity for the 3rd week in The Columbus Foundation
Summer Fellowship Program at Tech Corps is Learning.

After my presentation about Brand Identity set proposal on Monday,
there came a request for me to have these stuffs well-designed. At the
beginning, I planned to have a professional designer to help me with this work.
Unfortunately, this time is summer break for many design students. Because I
need some of these designs to use for my next projects, I decide to learn
Photoshop to work on logos first. It took me one day to learn the basic
functions of Photoshop and another day struggling with the black-white and
duotone setting on the Tech Corps logo. Finally I did it! I have more
confidence in myself to continue my work on other Tech Corps logos (Techie
Camp, Techie Club) next week. However, I also realize that this job is not my
strength and I would spend a lot more time to accomplish, needless to say about
quality of work, with a more sophisticated design. Now I start to seek for help
from a professional designer but from this experience, I have learned a new
skill: Photoshop.

During this week, our fellows joint a learning session at The
Columbus Foundation site. The session was about building different careers in
the non-profit sector. We met three senior executives of program development
& management, communications & marketing, donor services &
development at The Columbus Foundation. From their sharing and from my work
experience, I could see many similarities in job qualifications of the
non-profit and the for-profit workers, except one thing: passion of serving
community beyond any cost-profit goal. Working for a non-profit organization
will require more collaboration skill to engage with many different
stakeholders but people in this sector will enjoy better balance of the four domains of their life: work, home, community, and self. This advantage
will be a key driver to bring many people into the non-profit sector and make
it a very competitive employment area. The session was quite short but the
learning was powerful in shedding light on non-profit sector career perception.

Long weekend with national holiday is waiting. I plan to turn some
of my learning this week in producing quality result work next week.

Happy Independence Day!

Ha Dang