As our time at OSC comes to an end, I believe that it is essential to reflect over one of the most versatile courses in the IB diploma: CAS. As the acronym suggests, my experiences of this course revolved around aspects of creativity, service and action. This final post will summarize my CAS experiences in these three aspects and hopefully provide some sense of nostalgia over the last two challenging years.
Creativity:
The main experience in the creativity section of CAS was chess and my online engagement with the game. I have been playing this game since I was little and my time playing chess on chess.com has given me an enjoyable pastime along with keeping me intellectually simulated. My chess.com experiences touched one learning outcomes 1, 2 and 4, where I have identified areas of strength, undertaken challenges to solidify my strengths and improve on weaknesses as well as display commitment while doing these since I have continued to play chess on a regular basis so that I do not lose my touch on the game. My other main component of creativity was the COMUN experience concentrated around my role in the tech team. My interest in computers and technology motivated me to hold such a position and the fact that my responsibilities fell on such a eventful and impactful event made the experience even more meaningful. The main learning outcomes I met during my COMUN experience was 2, 5 and 6 where I undertook challenges and solved problems with time constraints, worked collaboratively with my fellow members in the tech team as well as demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance which is the main goal of the MUN. Furthermore my SGA responsibilities as treasurer and my winter intern with good market provided a contrast to other two experiences and heightened my creativity experience. I believe that my creativity experiences provided me with interesting and stimulating distractions from my busy DP schedule and I would change little to nothing about it!
Activity:
My engagement with the activity portion of the CAS experience was the smallest out of the three and is something I could potentially improve on. My main activity experiences lied in the wellness blocks of my school schedule and individual workouts, usually some sort of cardio workouts. These demonstrated my perseverance and commitment to the activity as well as testimony to the new challenges I undertook. Looking back, I believe that there was more potential in the activity aspect on my behalf and if I were to redo the CAS experience I would spend more hours on activity.
Service:
The last aspect of the CAS experience is service and my engagements with it have been mainly on the service activity in school as well my engagement with good market and my intern at dialog. Due to the COVID situation it was difficult to perform in person service so I resorted to online service which can be seen in the experiences listed above. I demonstrated perseverance and commitment to these services experiences as well as undertaking new challenges and learning new skills during my interns at good market and dialog. I also dealt with issues of global significance in my Recycling and Sustainability service group. Similar to my creativity experiences there is little to nothing I would change about my service engagements.
My CAS experience throughout my DP journey has been an enlightening and joyful one and if I had the opportunity to redo it all, I would take up without hesitation! I appreciate how CAS have helped me by providing a meaningful distraction to my DP academic life.