What I’ve Learned

It has been over one year since I first started my CAS project. For my project, I needed many specific skills, some of which were my weaknesses. The best example is communication. Over an year ago, this was one of my aspects to work on as I was better at individual tasks, and throughout the CAS experience I’ve improved this skill a lot to the extent of this being very easy for me now. Most of my project was based on communication and collaborating. Primarily working with my classmate Daniel who I’ve been working with to combine our ideas for our very similar projects. We have organized many events together such as clean-ups or presentations. This is just one of many examples. Then came my collaborations with local NGOs or other organizations. One of them was Connect Ocean, which helped me with my first celan-up and the micro plastics clean-up, as well as with the business human resource project which was combined with CAS. Another example is Makes Me Happy, which I was going to donate the school recycling and who invited me to present my project to the local government and a school in the small city of Santa Cruz. Unfortunately, these two events had to be cancelled upon the arrival of coronavirus to Costa Rica. Next came my small project of starting a waste management program for farmers in Buenos Aires, Puntarenas, where I had to communicate with the local farmers and the mayor of the town so that I could install the trash bin and get the municipality to clean it up. These are a few examples of how communication was crucial in this project, and I had to communicate with many people, mostly people I don’t personally know. This has allowed me to progress with this project and achieving my goals throughout this year. Most importantly, all of these examples really helped me develop me communication skills which are crucial to have, and I can now manage effectively. However, a moment where I faltered was last year when I spent a couple of weeks contacting people involved in the construction of the new Flamingo Marina to install a trash bin for the local boat workers. I contacted many boat owners and captains in the area until I finally got the contact of someone in the administration of the marina project to communicate my idea. After all of this hard work and important communication with many people, they closed the area to start working on the marina which stopped all of this process. Although it was frustrating when this happen, that was also an effective moment to improve my communication skills, which have been heavily improved by my progress in CAS.