My CAS Experience

Creativity.

For me, CAS has always contained aspects of creativity, something that I found while designing the website. Finding creative solutions for problems is something I personally believe I am quite good at, and my background as an artist means that I know what looks visually pleasing and what does not. This was extremely helpful during the creation of the website, and it’s been doubly so with my journey into my new woodworking project, something that is a creative outlet for me, and by building this place, I am allowing others to hopefully find a similar creative place. Over the break, I spent a lot of time creatively, as I had my first commission for a woodworking piece! I got a lot of that was done during that time, but I also started a couple of art projects. One of which also used wood, and is the 8th installation in a 13 piece series. Additionally, I had a lot of new ideas for art that I am going to be using in the upcoming trimester. 

Service.

I would say service made up the majority of my CAS experience, because of the nature of my project, that being the volunteer work that I did for CEPIA, building a website. For me, this was very helpful, aside from fulfilling the CAS requirement for IB. Putting that I volunteered for a non-profit company and built them an entire website looks great on both a college application along with a resume, but that is not why I did it. I believe in CEPIA and their mission, and I want them to succeed, and I found what I believed was a potential problem and I volunteered to fix it. As mentioned in my last entry, CEPIA found someone else who then re-did the whole website again, but in a custom HTML and java format, with increased user interaction and far more flexibility. While initially this was disappointing to hear, Laeticia shared with me that my work made the newer website much easier to build than if they had used the old website to create it. So while my website isn’t visible, it’s still there, just below the surface. It’s my writing that is still up there, and it was my work that brought it all together, and that is something I’m proud of. During this break, most of my “service” was done in the form of school work, something I was behind in because of my missed school. I made really good progress in a lot of different subjects, which felt amazing, especially because my sister kept telling me that I wouldn’t get all of it done in time. Spite is an amazing motivator….

Activity.

With regards to my projects, activity was less relevant than the other two aspects of CAS, however I am very athletic, and sports have always served as an outlet for me to manage the stress of school and other aspects of my life, so while it never was directly related to my CAS projects, being active and staying fit has always and will always be a relevant part of my life. For me, sports are a way to manage my mental health along with my physical, they allow me to build relationships with people in something that I know that we both enjoy, which in our small community can be rare. Unfortunately, because of my head injury, I was unable to get a ton of exercise/activity into my break. I was able to go on a couple of runs, during which I ran an 8½ kilometer run in about 45 minutes, which is amazing after being inactive for about a month. However, apart from that, not much else was done. I am looking forward to going back to water polo in a couple of days…