My first year in the IB Diploma Program has not only been a challenging, and enriching experience academically, but also an incredible experience in terms of the extra-curricular activities I have participated in. At the start of this year, I set a few goals to be achieved during the next two years for each of the three aspects of CAS: Creativity, Activity and Service. In this post I’ll be going over my progress towards achieving these goals and also the other key takeaways from my experiences in these areas

Creativity

For the creativity aspect of CAS, I set myself 2 key goals with regards to my main creative endeavors: COMUN, and SAISA Event Crew. For COMUN, I set myself the goals of building a mobile application about the conference and digitizing the participant application process completely. However, despite having a great year as the Head of Tech of COMUN, I didn’t achieve any of these goals. With regards to the mobile application, I simply didn’t have enough time to design an app and build it from scratch because with all the work from COMUN itself and the IB, all non-essentials had to be scrapped. In terms of the digitization of the application process, I encountered a roadblock because the secretariat pointed out that some participants might not be able to access a computer or internet connection in order to submit a digital application, and thus rely on print applications. A centralized digitized database of applications would be too much of a hassle with information flowing in from various sources and especially from non-digital sources. I also mentioned that I would like to develop a successor for my role as Head of Tech, and yet again I could not achieve this because like I mentioned in my post about COMUN, I couldn’t see anyone with the drive, passion and dedication that was required for the position. Nevertheless, although I won’t be officially participating in COMUN as an EXCO member next year, I will be working on helping out my successor by giving him/her the necessary resources to make COMUN 2020 a success. My other goals for creativity were with regards to my involvement in the Gecko Event Crew. This year, we hosted SAISA Girls Volleyball, and SAISA Art, and in both cases I played a major role in the event crew fulfilling all of the technological requirements. However, I couldn’t achieve the goal I set at the beginning of the year to build a Gecko Athletics application in order to serve the major new from all things about Gecko athletics. Because OSC will not be hosting any SAISA events next year due to security concerns, I will probably be able to achieve this goal in the time that I would have spent as an event crew member. Moreover, a Gecko Athletics app will be more useful than ever before because all of the athletes will be traveling and all tournaments will be hosted outside of Sri Lanka. In addition to COMUN, and Event crew I also showed my creative skills by winning the Film Fly Experience Australia video competition and doing work with GeckoNet and Primary GeckoNet. Overall, the creativity aspect as expected has been mostly based on my skills in Technology, which have greatly improved over the course of the year. However, I have also learnt a lot of about leadership, people skills and communication as a result of the senior roles I played in my creative employment.

Activity

Like I mentioned in the goals I set at the beginning of the year, I’m not a very active person. Nevertheless, in order to fulfill my CAS requirements and also be a more balanced student, I set myself the goal of participating in a SAISA tournament as an athlete and reducing my Golf handicap to a 15. I achieved the first goal by participating in SAISA Badminton in February, and experiencing the unique experience that is a SAISA tournament. Despite being a unique experience, participating in SAISA wasn’t really anything special, and I don’t think I’ll try again next year. This is especially because SAISA Badminton has just been moved to the third season of Gecko Athletics, which takes place just a few weeks ahead of the IB DP exams in May. I also set myself the goal of reducing my Golf handicap to a measly 15 strokes. During the last year, I participated in two golf tournaments, and it’s clear that I overestimated my capabilities with this goal. Based on my performance in the last two tournaments, reducing my handicap to 15 strokes would require hours of practice and hours more of participating in Golf tournaments as often as possible. Being a busy IB student with many other extra curricular commitments, these are just hours I don’t have. Nevertheless, because I still want to maintain a balanced lifestyle, I will continue to participate in less competitive active, curricular like fun Badminton, or fun Table tennis.

Service

Service is probably the most successful aspect of my CAS journey so far, because I’ve achieved all the goals I set for myself at the beginning of this academic year. I was the leader of the GeckoNetwork service group this year, and I set myself three goals — to increase the amount of content we produce, to setup a website, and setup a Primary GeckoNet. In terms of increasing the content we produced, I’ve done a lot of work to streamline the content creation production by hiring talented young individuals and delegating work very well. Last year, GeckoNet had posted a total of 11 videos on our YouTube channel, and this year we have posted almost triple the amount with 30 videos. The next goal was to build a website in order to give easy the OSC community easy access to our content. This was also a great success, I built a website and launched it at the start of the second quarter and now we’ve posted content from dozens of events and had over 1500 page visits on the website. My final goal was to setup a subsidiary of GeckoNet in the primary as we were ignoring a large segment of the OSC community by only serving content based on and for the secondary school community. Despite taking almost a semester to get the Primary GeckoNet up and running, so far we have produced 4 videos and built quite a reputation for ourselves within the primary with many interested viewers and potential participants. In addition to all of this, a significant achievement this year was the initiation of the Learning by Serving mini documentary series, which aims to broadcast the great work done by the other service groups at OSC. There’s no doubt that all of these things will continue into my leadership of GeckoNet next year. However, in addition to continuing with the good things I’ve done this year, a major goal I have is to build a strong and capable successor, as next year is my final year as a student at OSC.

 

Overall, this year, has been nothing short of exhilarating; academics have been challenging and exhilarating, and my CAS journey has added an invaluable element to the whole experience. Despite how annoying it is at times to keep up this blog, it has added an extra element to my extra-curricular experience and made it more enriching by forcing me to reflect and putting my work into words. With the summer coming up soon, I probably won’t be posting any more update about CAS, but don’t worry this is only the end of the first chapter and another whole year of great CAS experiences is just around the corner.