First week for the CoachLab Class of 2008 - a view from the inside

	The CoachLab class of 2008

Tshegofatso Lesole writes about her first week as a student in the Maxum Business Incubator's CoachLab™ leadership development programme.

First days never seem to end - the first day at preschool, primary school, high school, varsity and now the CoachLab.

It was Monday morning, the 3rd of March. The day could not have come any earlier. It would seem so easy to list all of us, but on the first day this was a horror. Different names from the different official languages and new faces seen all around the reception area. You could see excitement, joy and happiness in everyone's eyes, and a little bit of fear in between those. "Who are these people? Will they be with me in the CoachLab program? What do I say to them - just 'Hello' or more? If it's more, what must I say?"

The only face, name and voice familiar to all of us was of a woman who had made all those 'you-got-the-job' calls to us. It was Gopolang Setumo. She came to us in the reception area and gave us our name tags. She tried to make us feel important and innovative by all means and this made things much easier. As they say, first impressions last.

Most if not all of the ladies were on heels (trying to impress) - something that, for most of them, was not their regular 'pap 'n vleis'. With all the running around the Innovation Center, trying to get to know the whole place in a day, the shoes began to come off one-by-one. When the time came for a mini welcome briefing by our sponsors, Epi-Use, we all heard a loud "Thanks!!!!" from the ladies because this meant we could finally sit down for a while. Soon it was 13:00 and 'knock-off' time for us.

By day two, faces were now looking a bit familiar, there were fewer mental questions and more verbal communication now as we tried to find out more about each other than just names. Unfortunately time was not on our side so the conversations were cut short as we had to meet our sponsors on this day.

Suddenly, the day became scarier as we thought, "what are they going to say?". But this was all before the meeting started. "You are the cream of the crop for you to be here", they said. This line is still our motto today. It became our inspiration to work even harder. The day went by and we stored all lessons of the day in our knowledge repositories.

The third day came with the excitement of having been told the previous day that we would find a surprise waiting for us in our new office. A surprise it was - the office looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Desks were disassembled, chairs, computers and cables were all over the place. We had to create our own preferred office "fun" space, which took the whole day.

For most of us, CoachLab is our first work experience so the fourth day was very exciting as we went for training and personal and business etiquette. Jenny from the People Business Group gave us hints on how to carry ourselves personally and in the work environment. This is part of the Life Skills Development Programme that we have scheduled for the whole nine months of the CoachLab programme.

Waking up early for five consecutive days made most of us say "Woza Friday!!!" We couldn't wait for the end of the day, but we still had work to do. On the fifth day the real work started. We officially received our first project, tasks and project managers. In general the week was not as bad as we might have thought. It was exciting meeting each other and making new friends. It was just sad that one of us had to leave for academic reasons - just as we were beginning with the real stuff.

After a week like that, week two was a breeze.