What do FInsight, Mars and neurons have in common?

Humans want to go to Mars, and ESN Finland wants to shoot for the stars. So we built FInsight: a national “rocket ship” full of the newest team building, character building, and brand building technologies, and more!

FInsight, still in its early stages of development, is essentially a weekend full of activities, seminars, and workshops that brings together representatives from all sections around the country. The magic is that the atmosphere is, unlike the vacuum of space, full of relaxed, positive, and open-minded energy from its participants.

As a representative from ESN Metropolia, I have test driven FInsight I this past winter, and recently got to try out the new and improved FInsight II. The event was organised in my hometown of Helsinki by the lovely OC, and hosted at Aalto’s Design Factory. There is no better place for getting our sections to the stars. As a FInsight veteran, I knew about half the participants and organisers already; however FInsight should be cherished as a source for meeting new friends. The atmosphere made it really comfortable to make new connections to most of the new people.

One of the challenges that we all face in events, seminars, summits, etc., is that you meet so many people that it seems almost impossible to remember everyone’s ( or anyone’s ) name. One of the highlights of FInsight II was that there was a surprisingly large amount of focus on getting to know each individual person - their name, favourite things, and their skills. The ice breaking games were fun, but the fact that they focused on who people are made them extraordinary. After all, you wouldn’t expect anything less than extraordinary from a flight to the stars, would you?

The focus of this FInsight was on motivation and communication. Digital communication, especially visual communication, has many rules, but our hearts rest secure knowing that they - along with all other details you could possibly think of - are nestled safely in the ESN Wiki. No memorization or note taking necessary! But the lightheartedness of communication was brought out in workshops, where the participants were highly involved. For example, we wrote a practice article as a group (which, by the way, is what has so wonderfully inspired me to write this masterpiece).  Both communication and motivation are perfect subjects to go over just as the summer starts, so that sections can use this information and the extra daylight hours to create awesome recruitment and branding campaigns for the fall semester.

Another thing that stood out in this FInsight was that there was a personal skills motivational workshop. It can be easy to get caught up in the thrill of working with your team to build a better ESN that you forget to build a better you. But it is so important that members of ESN can have something to show for their hard work. Its easy to learn, but its not always easy to sell what you learned to a potential employer or sponsor, so this was a great topic to have in FInsight II.

To sum it all up, sending members to FInsight will definitely benefit your section, as the lessons they will bring back are limitless. Sending different members to the next FInsight will benefit us all, because the only way we will reach the stars is together. To illustrate this I will give you an analogy from neuroscience: there are an exponential number of neural connections being made in your brain as you are reading this, and humans are going to Mars because of the magnificent human brain. So, if ESNers were neurons, then the connections they would make at each FInsight are also exponential, and this will unite us so that ESN Finland will become magnificent.

Written by Catherine Fait, ESN Metropolia.