This lockdown and summer gave me some time to do the stuff that I enjoy and I did many different things in the first two weeks of my summer.

Creativity

During the lockdown, I stayed in my room for the majority of the time, staying in a confined space for a long period of time makes me feel really pressed. So I decided to decorate my room to make it really cool, I spent a day coloring my wall first, I did some decorations on the blank wall that is beside my window, (image on the right) because I white wall is really tedious to look at, then for the bigger wall, I actually colored it into white so I can project videos on it, The two images on the left show what it looks like, I projected fake window videos, dream-like scenes to my wall and it made my room turn into another world. I bought some black cardboards to cover up all the windows so the projector videos are brighter. Another creative thing I did is painting, I spent a night in my “projector” room drawing, it was super chill!

Reflection: At first I didn’t want to do this because I thought it was time-consuming because I really spent the entire day doing this room decoration. However, the final result gave me a lot of benefits, the atmosphere of the room helped me a lot with my stress and anxious mood during the lockdown, after working, I could just lay on my bed and watch these scenes, which was mentally relieving. I also did this during day time, which helped me to become more willing to do work and sit there for a long time.

Since it is summertime, I am also redesigning the social media feed for my sports science account, I want to make it look more simple and direct.

Then I continued doing my Sports Science page, I challenged myself to read research papers thoroughly, what I used to do is read the intro and jump right into the conclusion, and get what I’m looking for, but this time I decided to read the whole thing thoroughly and I discovered surprising amount of information. At first I found it hard to understand the paper very well, but then I searched the terminology, phrases, methods they used, as I’m doing research, I learned more and more new knowledge. Then I turned the knowledge I learned into simplified infographic posts. I also tried some new ways to engage with the audience:I made a graph hoping that it would make things more simplified and thus gaining more engagement but It didn’t really workout, I tried to redesign the template of my post but right now I’ve not seen any improvement in the engagement.

Activity

For Activity, I’m doing knee strengthening exercises for 5 days a week -> Monday to Friday. I’m starting from easier ones because, during the lockdown, I feel like my ability to move athletically became worse and worse, my lower body felt really weak and it could cause serious injuries, my knees have suffered a lot of injuries before, so I started from doing bodyweight knee strengthening exercises. Then I’m also doing rehab exercises because I got a really bad bicep tendonitis a few weeks ago.

This activity is a new challenge for me because I really don’t like the tedious process of recovering and re-building up to a goal that I previously achieved, because now I’m trying to make myself jump as high, run as fast as I previously did, It is really sad for me to re-do the work. But I believe this task is making me stronger at being consistent even when the process is boring, it also helps me to learn how to adapt to sudden changes.

I also played some basketball, my goal is to get back in shape for basketball because my progress with basketball stagnated during this time, so I decided to find a time when there’s no one around to practice basketball. This experience challenged my ability to make plans because in order to get back and start improving, I need to set out plans for myself or I will definitely get injured because I haven’t practiced in so long. So I started with shoot around and low intensity drills for my legs to get used to it. Then I would slowly progress, I increased the intensity every week. One indicator of how successful the plan was is my own body, I didn’t feel any uncomfortable as the intensity of my workout increased, compared to what I did before – which is training intensely right after 1 week of not doing any exercise and eventually led to injuries – this time I actually had a plan to prevent my body from getting injured.

First of all, here’s the list for what I’ve done for CAS this year

Creativity

1. Learning how to cook
2. cas.sports.science instagram
3. Charity art club valentine’s event
4. a lot of paintings
5. charity art club designs

Activity

1. Training my Vertical Jump
2. Basketball Pre tryout training
3. Volleyball season
4. Basketball season
5. cas.sports.science instagram

Service

1. menshen drawing/CNY activity
2. elderly population awareness video
3. winter sale
4. tote bags Lebanon relief fund

Challenges: throughout a lot of my cas experiences, I’ve set challenges for myself and I’ve also encountered unexpected challenges too. In the beginning of the year, the biggest challenge for me is to balance my sports time and academic time, during that time, I really wanted to make varsity because I got cut for two years already, however, academic stress was a different level compared to 10th grade, one challenge for me is to consistently practice my basketball and follow the schedule, another mental barrier for me is pushing myself because sometimes I feel really tired. In my Charity Art Club projects, the challenge I set for myself was to make this club stand out again, the challenges the I encountered was communication problem. I had several communication problems with the executive team and that led to dissatisfaction on both sides, but after many projects, I began to learn how to be a better leader.

Learning New Skills: I think I’m always developing new skills throughout CAS experience, for my cas.sports.science social media account, I’m making posts about kinesiology and physiology knowledge, which is an area that I’m interested in but not knowledgable in, so throughout the process, I’m exploring new knowledge in an unknown area. I’m also developing new skills as I am connecting with companies, workshops, experts in this area. One unexpected thing that happened is that my account grew pretty fast, It reached to 400 followers within a month, so I was exposed to many people working in this field. The first ever connection I made was one of the executive in Dari Motion (a company that make athletes’s performance into statistics) and she was based in Korea, she asked many people to assess a set of statistics of an athlete they gave, and fortunately I was one of them, the player they wanted me to assess was an NFL player which freaked me out, at first I wanted to decline and avoid this, but after a lot of thinking, I decided to try it, and luckily, after a whole day of researching and writing, I was able to write a pretty good report for her and she said she will keep in touch with me when I’m graduated from college, which is a super good opportunity, this unexpected result told me that I should accept challenges and take risk, This experience helped me grew a lot because I was suddenly exposed to a higher level thing, the way they talk, the way they do things are very professional which freaked me out. But gradually, as I am exposed to more experiences like this, I become used to it. I also encounter a lot of failures during this process, for example, I contacted a company that sell a product called NeuroPak, my goal was to try this thing out and if it give good results, I wanted to make it available in Taiwan, so I asked them if we could work together, but after learning I was a high schooler, I got declined. This taught me skills about communication, I need to be really formal, acting like I’m an executive in a company, so even when they learn I’m a high schooler, they will still be willing to work together.

Working Together: my friends all know that in group work, I want to do everything and I intervene everything even if it’s just a font of the slide. But this toxic trait of mine is slowly being erased. majority of my cas experiences involve with working with other people, so after a bunch of experiences and projects, I’m finally getting rid of this trait. I learned the lesson the hard way, I’m pretty sure a lot of my partners hated me at first, and I saw that, I saw the detrimental effects of being manipulative as a leader, so I read some books my friends gave me about this topic, continued to work with people, and watched some youtube videos, and eventually I learned the importance of actually working together.