Factual Journal Entry

Hello all. I am alive. Contrary to how it may appear, I actually have not been living under a rock or on a remote island for the last 4 weeks. In fact, I have been living what I would consider my best life: Going to Atlanta, hanging with friends and family, and even managing to fit in some CAS related stuff along the way. Oh and of course the ever present IB, constantly blessing my life with knowledge, mental expansion, and enough stress to kill a small horse. Granted, I’ve also had some epiphanies in the last few weeks, including the fact that while we may have more work than the UN Human Rights Committee allows, panicking and stressing does nothing while analyzing, planning, and executing makes even the most daunting of tasks seem not only manageable, but truly conquerable. And so I’ve been working on constantly improving my mentality – I’ve become far more positive and am learning better ways to approach life and IB. But enough about me! It’s been a while since I’ve done tangible work on my project, but fear not, O’ faithful IB examiner, for I have been hard at work on my directly CAS related CCP (College & Career Planning) Public Speaking Politics Club (or CCPPSPC for short). This club deals largely in enhancing students public speaking by working on both technical factors (reduced repetition, voice projection, intonation, etc.) as well as more mental/psychological factors including confidence and pacing. Public speaking is a massive part of both MUN and positions in the United Nations Organization itself, and we feel that by helping students fine tune these skills we will be able to all collaboratively improve our public speaking as well as our communication skills in general. So far, we’ve worked on some more serious topics like reducing pacing, staying focused, controlling movement, etc. We have also given our students some leeway and more entertaining ideas to take the stress away, best shown by our “How to Speak like a Hollywood Dictator 101” course. Let’s just say that if any of our students ever get assigned North Korea as their country, well they’ll do just fine. Now, while public speaking is an integral part MUN, current events are just as if not more important. Unfortunately in our world today, trying to discern anything meaningful from the 80 articles you see a day is like trying to find a TOK question that doesn’t start with “To what extent” – it just doesn’t happen. And so, off of that, our group felt it would be appropriate to cover current events with a summary each week, along with a news event that was positive. Those current events, as well as some basic CAS recalibration and focusing on getting prepared to plan phase 2 of my project will take up this week and ensure that I stay busy. Anyways, that was my last 4 weeks and this one, but the real question is what comes next? I’ll be frank, these next few weeks will be some of the busiest and most difficult of my entire high school career. I have multiple IB assignments, as well as a wide variety of final exams and ~random~ slide presentations. Does this mean that my focus on CAS will diminish or disappear as it has (a little) recently? Absolutely not. My plan for these next few weeks is exactly that: to plan. I work best with clear guidelines, so my goal is to spend my time diligently and accurately planning out the next steps of my project (did I hear Gantt Chart?) to ensure that I can work most efficiently. As for summer, I don’t exactly know what it holds, but I can tell you that the basics of what I must do (aside from getting into college) will be contacting local schools using the help of native spanish speakers to garner interest in MUN, creating new topic lists, and training a more selective La Paz MUN team! These three tasks may sound simple but they will require a mountain of planning. The best I can do is hope, pray, and take it bit by bit, one piece at a time. Analyze and Execute.