One for all, all for One!

IS Musketeer mascot

looking back now... it has been 2 years since I joined my very 1st virtual team. At the time, it was called the AIESEC.net Help Team and today everyone knows it as the IS Musketeers (a cooler name!). I've gained so much being involved in this team and the best thing is that you DON'T need to be good with computers though it would be an advantage!

Working in a virtual team is an experience itself. Imagine working with a group of 23 young energetic youth from 13 countries is a challenge in itself. Take for example, if we were to have team chats; it is never easy to decide on a most suitable time for everyone and we would have to vote for the best time and day. There was once where I had to attend the team chat on Thursday at 2AM (Malaysia time) which lasted about 2 hours, and had to stay alert for classes at 8am. Try staying awake in the "early" mornings and have an AIESEC team meeting and you would get what I mean.

Also, I've only met a few of the IS Muskis in person. And it almost to impossible to have everyone meet up unless we all attend the same AIESEC conference.

left to right: me, Janaka (Sri Lanka), Kiko (AI VPIS 06/07), Abhishek (AI GIS Manager 06/07) at International Congress 2005 India

This are some of the IS Muskis that I've met in my whole 2 years. The two others that I've met are Divyang (India) and Eduardo (Peru and IBM Intern with AIESEC UKM). And the others I've only seen them in photos in the IS Muskis community and on MSN. It would be great if one day I could meet each and everyone of them in person.

So what's the advantages of being an IS Muskis? One thing for sure is that you are given special privilledges/admin rights on all the AIESEC IS platforms which includes AIESEC.net communities, AIESEC.net email, Insight XP etc. Just imagine that you are the moderator to every single AIESEC.net communities there is and able to access everything on Insight XP. Well, with much power, comes much responsibilities! Like I shouldn't go around messing up the forms in Insight XP or else my admin rights will be taken away. However, with all these admin rights, I've learned how the IS platforms work together and how they could be improve in the near future.

On a weekly basis, I would need to fight bugs on the bugtrackers. This means that I would need to solve user request/bugs about the IS platforms. Usually I'm more interested in the Email & Insight XP bugtracker as the bugs are easier to solve. Besides that I'm also involved in team projects from time to time. Some of the projects which I was involved in are the AIESEC.net Help Centre (www.aiesec.net/support), communities clean up, testing "SALENTUS" (our new Database Server with ORACLE 10G) and many others. I've also had the opportunity to lead projects like the IS Mukis for Dummies guide, which is a guidebook for new IS Muskis to learn the art of fighting bugs. Currently I'm leading a team working on the Global IS Training Materials project. You would be seeing promotional banners and emails soon about this project.

Being on this team has definetely given me a chance to get connected with young people all around the world. And now I have a group of friends from more than 20 different countries today. So if you want to have similar experiences that I've got; then apply to be on a Global Support Team today!