First of all, here’s the list for what I’ve done for CAS this year
Creativity
- Learning how to cook
- cas.sports.science instagram
- Charity art club valentine’s event
- a lot of paintings
- charity art club designs
Activity
- Training my Vertical Jump
- Basketball Pre tryout training
- Volleyball season
- Basketball season
- cas.sports.science instagram
Service
- menshen drawing/CNY activity
- elderly population awareness video
- winter sale
- 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.