I wrote my first CAS post 9 months ago, and what a journey it has been since then. DP1 has been more or less the most incredible year of my school life and with just one week left of school, there’s a lot to look back on. So, let’s begin!
CREATIVITY
I started this year off with being the master of ceremony for UN day, to chairing COMUN XXV, helping out with the SAISA event crew, to doing lighting for the senior production and the spring & winter galas.
UN day was an event full of working collaboratively with others, undertaking new challenges, and engaging with issues of global importance at OSC. I spent the beginning of the day doing interactive presentations with different students in our community and enlightened them on green technology and it’s effect and impact on the world today. As for the assembly, later on, I was the MC so I had to guide the assembly in the direction planned and made sure everything went smoothly.
COMUN XXV was a long but memorable experience that I will cherish forever. Colombo Model United Nations had their 25th session this year, which I was lucky enough to be a part of. I worked collaboratively with members of the executive committee (EXCO) and had to lead the debate for the International Press Committee (IPC). Chairing is not new to me but the committee was, this year was the first time COMUN hosted a journalist press in the conference so that was quite a paradigm shift in the Sri Lankan MUN platform. In total, we had about 140 essays to grade (this is probably the reason I will never become a teacher) and engaged with issues of global importance including the Indian-Pakistani conflict.
Supporting the arts through technical methods is always something I aim to do since I don’t play an instrument nor act. The Winter and Spring Gala are hosted at OSC every alternate year and this year was absolutely remarkable. I did the lights by myself with the assistance of our auditorium technical manager, Lakshita. We spent about 4 days of rehearsal in total going through all the different performances and ensembles. Here, I spent more time developing new skills and working with the performers as I was not quite experienced with lighting until this year and I had to spend time understanding what each performer’s lighting requirements and preferences were to make them feel comfortable and match their performance.
ACTIVITY
Season 1 began with my training for volleyball with the girls’ SAISA volleyball team to develop new tactical skills and gain more sporting experience. Later on, I moved to prepare for SAISA girls’ football.
Volleyball was a very new experience for me as I had not played it competitively before. I was new to the concepts of the game and was surprised by the complexity in technique and movement of the game. I focused on first learning the basics of the game and how I could use these techniques in other scenarios, but by the end of the season, my passion for volleyball had grown and I began to enjoy it more as a sport than a game of technique. I spent a lot of time working with the team and understanding their strategies and where I needed improvement. This is when I noticed that I was increasing my awareness of my strengths and areas of growth, as I started to play more attention to what I was doing wrong and how I could correct myself. Once I could identify these areas, the game became a lot more fun and interesting for me as I could tell what was difficult for me and others, and what kinds of plays would be harder to respond to than others.
Football and I have a very long and progressive relationship. I began playing football in 2016 and joined the SAISA team when I was in 8th grade. Since then, my football experience has remained annually consistent. I believe that football is a game of collaboration and risk-taking, more than anything. I have always loved football and have always grown attached to my team by the end of each season. As I said in my Football post, there’s a lot of things I consider when playing but my main three things are: collaboration, attitude, and defending. It’s difficult to believe that next year will be my last year playing but hopefully, it will be a good one.
SERVICE
This year’s been a good year for GeckoNetwork, however, it will also be my last.
I have been in the service group GeckoNetwork for the last two years now, and it has grown and developed so much within this short period of time. Firstly, we began by launching our website to have a more convenient platform to access our photos and videos from and then came SAISA. Since we hosted SAISA girls volleyball this year, GeckoNet was heavily involved in covering all the photography and videography for our teams and making sure they were all available for the public as soon as possible. SAISA was a huge success and we made every moment of it count: from the opening ceremony to the awards assembly. We also started “GeckoNet Microdocumentaries” where we emphasized the phrase “learning through serving”. Since our service does not directly collaborate with a specific community in need of some sort of support, we decided to make a project where we go out to other services and take photos and videos of what they do while also learning the essentials of their service. I think this was the best part about GeckoNetwork as we were pursuing our service’s roots along with helping, working and learning about other communities in need. I really enjoyed this because I love spending time collaborating with others and this year, I realized that I loved it so much that GeckoNetwork was not the place for me. However, I have really enjoyed my time at GeckoNetwork and I have learned a lot from being in the group.
Now this is epic