I recently took part in a resource allocation task which allowed me to reflect on my understanding of how some people have more of a struggle than others when working towards a goal, due to their different resources and opportunities.

During this task, I was placed in a group and given an envelope full of resources that my group and I had to use to create something useful to a new first year student at university, something that we would have found useful ourselves. My group worked well together and were continuously praised for our efforts while it seemed to me as if other groups were struggling more and receiving more negative criticism.

It wasn’t until the end of the task that I realised not everybody in the room had been given the same resources; while my group had plenty of resources, some groups’ resources were extremely limited.

When it was explained to us that this task was to mimic circumstances people have to deal with in the real world and that we will face these kind of things during our profession, it seemed the less fortunate groups had realised what was going on during the task whereas the fortunate groups including the one I was in didn’t.

I found this very interesting as in our groups we were unable to see that not everybody had the same resources and opportunities and this paralleled that in the real world we might not see outside of the way we live but we have to understand that everybody is different, not everybody will be able to achieve their goals as easily as others and this is important to take note of when entering our professions.

Overall, I enjoyed the resource allocation task as it helped broaden my understanding while doing something practical to get the point across.