How are you going to fulfill all the needs of your project?

It requires weekly love and attention from you to grow and flourish.

We are given 1-2 CAS classes a week in order to grow our project. During these classes, I am communicating with my teammates to establish our week’s tasks and make sure they help us reach our overall goal. However, we don’t only focus on our project during the two hours we are given. On Saturdays we practice solos with the dancers, communicate with our mentor throughout the week, and even during vacation, our project is still being considered. During spring break I was in constant communication with Gaby to choose costumes for the dancers at the studio and figure out how to bring them back from the USA to Costa Rica.  

It requires thought and innovation to differentiate it and make it noticeable.

My CAS project has come a long way since I started. In the first trimester of 11th grade, our project and our goals were not clear. We started by helping our mentor put on her end of the year dance recital, which was mostly her project and we assisted in small ways. By the start of the second trimester, we sat down and brainstormed projects that we thought would make a difference for the arts in our community, which made a big difference in the path of our project. We’ve made a couple of feasibility studies and are about to make our third to see if our ideas are realistic and beneficial. We have come up with several new ideas that we wish to accomplish such as choreographing dances for competitions, teaching underprivileged kids how to dance, and building a stage for our community since there isn’t one. 

It requires you to communicate with others about the project to create community.

Communication is not something the three of us struggle with in my opinion. We remain in contact with our mentor and each other constantly, whether that be during class, scheduled meetings, text messages, or emails. This last week we have taken a step forward with communicating with La Paz Administration for the stage project. My teammate wrote an email to the director to advise him of our intentions and schedule a meeting. During the meeting, we will be able to discuss the status of the project and consider if it’s feasible for both us and the school. Through communication with both our mentor and the director, we will grow the arts in our community whether that is through a new stage for performing arts or dance classes. 

It requires hard work and energy to gather momentum.

The next few weeks for our CAS project are fairly busy. We have a competition in two weeks and our first meeting with Mr. Abel is on Tuesday. Alone both of these projects require a decent amount of attention at the moment. I think my major source of motivation at the moment is just having a crammed schedule. If I had tons of time to get things down then I wouldn’t work so hard to accomplish something until the end. However, my current situation with not attending school the past couple of days and the increase of large assignments all due, along with the need for constant rehearsals has forced me to remain motivated in order to do everything I desire to accomplish.