TKS Session 14: Global Community Session

This week’s session was the last TKS session of 2025. To celebrate, we did a global community session where all Activate members joined in one big call to do some activities and bring 2025 to an end. The first part of the session was just for Activate students, where we did the MotW and a couple of activities. The second part of the session was open to all TKS alumni to join and connect with current students.

We began the session by doing a roundtable discussion about our takeaways for the past for months of TKS. For me, a big takeaway from these past four months was learning about the importance of team dynamics. Through all the projects I did and the deliverables I produced, I learned that the quality of the team I worked with influenced the product, no matter how committed I was. If not everyone else were at my level, then we wouldn’t be able to get as much done, or you would end up pulling so much of the weight that the quality of your projects still wouldn’t be that good. The challenges we worked on taught me that I need to be very mindful of the people I choose to work with, and it showed me how much I can accomplish when I work with hard-working and honest people.

We then did the MotW, which was to celebrate others. We usually go over this mindset during global community sessions because we are all together as a community, looking to foster new connections and get to know each other better. Celebrating others not only makes others feel good, but also does good for yourself. Celebrating others also helps people to feel more confident, more seen, and to keep going when things get tough. But, in the context of TKS, it helps foster that community and showcases all the amazing stuff TKS students are working on. We each wrote a shoutout message in our global channel to create this big thread full of supportive and celebratory messages.

We then finished off the first half of the session with activities like a group scavenger hunt, did some housekeeping for the New Year, and then moved on to the second half of the session, alumni socials.

Using a platform called Gather, we all joined this “virtual world” that was Christmas themed, where everyone got their own avatar and were able to walk around the world and interact with it and each other. Each time you walked up to someone or joined a communal space, you and those people would hop on a voice chat and could start connecting. The idea of the platform is to simulate real environments where you can hear everyone talking to each other and can walk up to anyone to strike up a conversation. I had never used a tool like that before, but I thought it was so cool and such an awesome way to make connecting with others online so fun and “realistic” to do.

We spent time on that platform for about an hour, connecting with current Activate students and TKS alumni, and then that was the end of the session for this year. Everything will start up in the New Year again, and I’m looking forward to all the new projects and challenges we will get to work on as well!