Demoing to the High Commissioner of the UNHCR

I’m volunteering with The Refugee Centre to work on this mobile app that aims to make the process of applying and reviewing refugee applications more efficient. The idea emerged when the number of asylum seekers increased dramatically over the summer (2017), creating a huge bottleneck and it was clear that some innovation was needed in this space.

Anyways, so this project is also supported by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the commissioner Filippo Grandi was on his trip to Canada. The first stop for this big trip was The Refugee Centre in Montreal, where teams were tasked with demoing their projects to the commissioner himself as well as all the media that come with him. Pretty big deal. 😰

Demo Day:

On the day of the big demo, we had to show up early in the morning and make sure everything was set up. The stress was building up inside of me, but my teammates and I were confident and even added some pretty cool last minute features to the app (Yes I know, that’s risky). At 8 AM, the media crew from the UNHCR showed up and they were ready to listen to our demo. Filippo wasn’t there yet, but we went ahead and demoed the app. It went really smoothly, better than I expected and everything worked like a charm. So I thought to myself “this is it, I can finally sit back and relax, my work for the day is done”. Nope, it was now 9 am and Mr Grandi and his crew finally showed up.

Camera crews from various news organizations suddenly filled the place, there was Le Devoir, CBC/Radio-Canada, and others. I was called upon to redo the presentation, but I had shifted away from that mindset already and was kind of shaken up by all the extra presence. “Okay, stay calm, you nailed it once, just do it all over again”. I felt weird about repeating the same things given that some people were still present from the first demo, so I decided to switch things up on the fly during the presentation. That was a mistake. Things didn’t go quite as well, and I felt bad about getting it right in the “rehearsal” earlier on but changing things on the spot for the big one. Oh well, lesson learned ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

A couple of other teams presented their project after us, and it went extremely well!

Aftermath:

The aftermath was great though, we got interviewed by a couple of people and found the story of the visit on various platforms. All positive! It does feel good to know you’re working on something that will potentially solve a source of pain to a lot of people.

Here are a couple of the articles where the project was mentioned:

Retrospect:

One thing I like to do when going through new experiences is to reflect and see what I can improve upon. One of my takeaways here is that I want to improve my English public speaking. I’m currently learning my 4th language (English isn’t my first by the way) and as most multilingual people know, you’re always forced to readjust your brain when switching languages and it causes you to get mixed up. So I feel like it would be a great asset to master public speaking in English so I can be more comfortable in freestyling a presentation under pressure (it’ll also be beneficial for everyday life). Hope I get the time to work on this soon! 😃

Group Photo with the High Commissioner of the UNHCR