My First Year of CAS

How I went into DP1

I was more than a little worried going into DP1, firstly with all the new academic challenges, but almost more so with the various new none academic challenges I’d taken on as well.

Creativity

In creativity I fought to balance commitments to a number of old interests.

COMUN

While Colombo Model United Nations by its very nature deals with issues of global significance, and I have learn’t so much from it about debate and international politics, that knowledge is minor compared to what it has taught me about operations and management as under-secretary general for the 25th conference. Firstly I learn’t that I am not innately a person suited to managing large teams of people, this was an area in which I needed to grow and develop. Recognizing this challenge I attempted to develop the skills needed for this in a number of ways, focusing on clear and repeated communication, avoiding petty conflict, avoiding sarcasm, checking in regularly, finding balances between micromanaging and being unhelpful, figuring out who could be trusted with extra responsibilities etc. A thousand challenges that I haven’t had to really deal with before because while I have led groups five or more people before for different tasks, never for such a large project, never over such a long period of time, and never with people who I wasn’t at least somewhat familiar with before hand. To plan and initiate the conference, the practice debates, to persevere and problem solve through the range of logistical, structural, interpersonal, ethical and financial challenges of the conference was not an easy experience but looking back on it, it was very worth while. By far the most stressful component of the conference aside from finding sponsors, was ensuring that every decision made with regards to the different rules and regulations of the conference were completely fair and ethical in the treatment of the different schools and private delegates.

The Advocate

In the Advocate I work collaboratively with a number of co-editors and magazine designs, to initiate and plan the advocate literary competition and magazine. Most recently I have had learn the new skills of website and visual design, this was new to me as Ive always focused more on the editorial side of it. Editing has its own challenges taking in the various ethical considerations of editing and occasionally censoring other peoples pieces, as well as designing competition criteria and rules to allow a range of pieces of different themes or styles to compete together. Going forward The Advocate aims to do more than just competitions and magazines, we aim to function as a literary workshop as well. To practice and improve upon our craft through activities, ranging themes and peer feedback.

Some of our work-

https://oscadvocate.weebly.com/

Senior Production (A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Oberon)

I have always been interested in theatre, and have played a number of minor to middling roles since primary, but never such a large and central role. The first challenge was memorizing shakespearian dialogues and monologues, some of which being longer than any regular speech I’ve done with a script. This was an entirely new and personally shocking skill to learn. But the second nearly greater challenge was learning them to the point where the words had lost their meaning, and then bringing emotion and action into them. Then finally managing my part while coordinating with the dozens of other actors and stage and lighting crew, with an audience watching. Overall this was a fun and extremely satisfying experience that I hope to try again soon.

Activity

I have never been an extremely athletic person, but I was intent this year on finding a sport, some kind of physical challenge that I could grow into, understand and eventually do well. My hope was for a single sport where I could focus on for a long period of time, ideally a lifelong hobby.

Tennis

Tennis was my first try and this, an entirely new experience to me that pushed me more physically than anything I have attempted prior. I kept at it for a bit over three months, trying to understand the different skills it requires from foot placement, more hand eye coordination than I have ever needed before, serving and constant movement. However I eventually decided to leave it, it didn’t hold my interest as something to develop into over a course of years.

Archery

Archery was my second attempt at this, while I had tried my hand at it when I was younger I had never made a concerted and focused attempt to develop and grow within it. Gradually relearning it, independently improving my upper body strength, slowly developing and perfecting my technique. I do believe that archery thanks to its extreme focus on technique, as well as the discipline and perseverance, is likely to be a sustainable lifelong hobby.

Service

Checkmates

Checkmates has been a commitment of mine for several years now, while it is me teaching chess, it has always been a way for me to learn as well. The ability to communicate despite language barriers, and to collaborate with and delegate work to other teachers has been extremely interesting and fascinating for me to learn. The experience of constantly researching, testing and adapting different teaching techniques, as well as seeing the gradual progress of our students is always motivating and uniquely fascinating.

The Year Overall

Overall this has been an year of great personal and intellectual growth, dealing with a number of unique new challenges. I have managed to maintain and seen to fruition a number of long term commitments like model united nations, The Advocate and Checkmates, as well as find new projects to grow and grow alongside like Archery. Going on to next year I intend on maintaining and developing some of these commitments, as well as taking on new challenges to interest me. While making an effort to keep my CAS work in balance with the increased academic challenge of DP2.