Mangla overcomes her obstacles with great self - confidence

Hi, I’m Mangla Meher, a student of PACE Hospitality Training Center in Udaipur. I belong to Mathania, a small village in the Jhalawad district of Rajasthan. My family has 5 members including my father, who is paralyzed, my mother who is a homemaker, my brother who is married yet unemployed, and my uncle who is a farmer and who is the only earning member in the family. I completed my education till the 12th grade with great difficulty. I helped my uncle in his daily agricultural activities but the monetary yield was not enough to feed my entire family. Hence, I decided to take up a full-time job but found that I did not have the required skills.

Coincidentally, around that time I met Arjun Sir (Pratham mobilizer) who came to my village to inform us about the PACE hospitality training program. He gave me a ray of hope and I immediately wanted to enroll myself. Though I did not know much about hospitality and about the placement prospects, I knew I would be pursuing the course to help my family financially and this motivated me to join the course.

I faced many challenges initially – I neither knew English nor had any idea about computers. I was low on confidence and was subsequently very introverted. But slowly as I worked on these skills, I saw a marked improvement in my knowledge and understanding of the same. Now I have great friends at the center, can understand and speak English and have become well accustomed to computers. During our course, we got the golden opportunity to visit and stay at the Taj Lake Palace for 7 days. I learned a lot during that period and got real world experience of the knowledge we had received at our center.

I had my first job interview with Leela Palace, Udaipur and only 3 students got selected out of the 14 that applied. I was one among the lucky 3. We had 5 rounds of interviews that we had to go through to get selected and I was proud of being selected. Being selected gave me immense self-confidence and the feeling that I was now ready to face the world.

I felt exhilarated after completing the hospitality course from PACE and I would like to thank all the staff and the people behind the implementation of this course, from the bottom of my heart. I consider this course my first stepping stone towards success.