Journal entry

Taking on a project like this is definitely a new challenge for me and demonstrates the learner profile of a risk taker. The responsibility of organizing an event like this is very new and exciting, even though it can be overwhelming at times. Some new challenges I’ve taken on are; collaborating and communicating with different adults that are contributing to the event. This includes my parents, businesses we contacted for the raffle, and teachers at school in order to promote my event. The self management aspect of it has also definitely been a new challenge taken on, at the beginning it was definitely sometimes a struggle to gain the motivation to work on the project and actually start planning it on paper. Managing a CAS project on top of school work has sometimes been challenging and stressful as it’s something you have to be constantly working on, there’s so many parts to it like the marketing, getting people to sign up, raffle prizes, tickets etc. Although I think in the past months I’ve significantly improved in my organization for the event, keeping all the little details written down together, managing my time and my work ethic. Another risk or challenge I’ve taken is to organize something involving more than the school community. In past years everything has been between my school community, but for this event I’m involving myself in the wider community.

I think going through these challenges and learning how to manage myself is extremely important. It’s the only class where we don’t have a teacher telling us exactly what to do, no one sets due dates for us, meaning we are completely responsible for the outcome of our project. Since I’m getting closer to graduating, I think it’s very important for me to learn everything these challenges will teach me, allowing me to be hopefully a little more prepared for adult life. 

I think one of my strengths, even though sometimes a weakness, is my perfectionism and attention to detail. This strength has really been key for me in organizing an event like this that has so many components, this is my main fundraiser so it’s very important to me that the event has a good turn out and people are attracted to it. Being a perfectionist makes me constantly think about the project, which is what has allowed me to come up with most of the good ideas. Although it can be overwhelming to almost constantly be thinking about it, it has allowed me to find flaws and really figure out every detail of the event.  Other strengths that I’ve found as I’m developing this project are determination, organizational skills, autonomy and independence. 

These new challenges are all very exciting to me because I think I’ve done a good job at managing/overcoming them and I’m excited for what I hope will be a successful event. I’m mainly excited because that means I will finally have funds and be able to help the animals in our community which has always been my main goal and the driver of my motivation to organize this event in the first place.