CAS

End August CAS Reflection

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Activity

In August, I started training for basketball again, I started to to gain weight in Mid August, I have failed few times before, and during summer, I dropped 4kg because I wasn’t eating enough. I reflected on my past experiences and made some changes. In the past, I get frustrated because whenever I eat excessive calories, I get acne, I would become anxious and couldn’t decided if I should continue or not. This time I decided to be calmer and be consistent with my progress. Another change I made is my eating habit, I didn’t really like eating repetitive meals, so I did a lot of research on recipes and learned many new ways of cooking, however, there are no infinite recipes for me to use, so I still need to get used to it. These are some small changes I made, the following are some big changes I made, the first one is that I started making prep meals, as mentioned in my previous posts, I have” time anxiety” and I always think there’s not enough time for me to do things, especially cooking, but 3 days prep meals only took about 1-2 hours, the second major change I made is that I stopped checking on my weight everyday, this process of weight gaining hard because I’m always battling with my anxious mind, I used to look at the weight everyday and If I didn’t make progress I would get upset, I changed this habit and decided to check my weight once per week. I ate 500-700 more calories per day based on the activities I did that day, if It is leg day, I would distribute more to that day, if it’s rest day, I would not eat as much. After about 15 days, my weight gained from 58 to 59.8kg.

Creativity and Service

Recently, I have been working on Charity Art Club, we started to make social media presence and started recruiting members and execs. Besides this, we’re also initiating an event that could contribute to the community. We’ve decided to make a large installation art, this installation art is composed of many small artworks. What we will do is separate our members into groups, each group will brainstorm about their topic, the topic is about “something you think is important that happened in this world in 2020-2021”. At the end, we will combine all artworks together and it will form a shape that is the most iconic about 2020 or 2021, it could be Taiwan, Coronavirus, Human Rights Movement (The Fist).etc. This year, as the consultant of the club, I feel like organizing the club has become easier for me, I learned some important characteristics of a leader from some youtube videos and made some changes, the first thing is that I started to have exec meeting every friday no matter how much work I have that week, that way we can be consistent as a club and people will respect and value this club, the second change I made is distributing jobs, I started setting expectations for each execs and gave them hard deadlines rather than trying to be overly nice, we planned things together in google calendar so everyone are on the same page. I also learned that as a leader of this club, my characteristics are really important too, because it determines whether people would take me seriously, so I am working on staying calm when something didn’t go as planned, and I also working on shaping myself as a consistent and reliable person, such as keeping all the promises (and don’t always talk about unrealistic promises) this takes a very very long time to change my “personality” since I’m the currently the opposite of these traits. but I’m happy this club helped me to realize these issues right now.

We’re planning to put this installation art in the lobby by December, as something that “ends 2021 and introduce people to 2022”, everything is still in the early planning stage I will update more progress on it.

This is a poster I designed for CAC

End July CAS Reflection – Learning 3D Animation, Sports and CAC

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Creativity

I spent majority of my time in end July learning an app called BLENDER, it’s an app that allows us to create 3d objects,

how did I discover this – I’ve been really interested in movies and game graphics, I spent many hours watching game movie scenes because they looked really realistic, so with the goal of creating a beautiful scene myself, I decided to search for methods to create 3d scenes.

I believe this has been a really challenging CAS experience, there are many things in the app and it’s impossible to understand all of them. As a beginner, I only understand a few options so sometimes it requires some problem solving to create the object I want. This donut is the first object I made, I spent about 5 hours making the shape because it was the first ever object I tried to make. The second one, a more complex one only took me 1 hour because I got used to the app.

I thought this summer was a really good opportunity for me to learn new things, learning how to use blender could also help me in IB arts because I have decided to use digital arts for my artworks exhibition. It was challenging and time consuming but the final result always gave me a sense of achievement.

 

EndJune CAS Reflection

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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.

End of the year CAS reflection

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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.

 

March CAS Reflection (2)

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Service and Creativity

I continued to focus on my sports science blog for the past two weeks, I tried a lot of different methods that would help me to gain the most impressions, which helps me to make my account reach more people. Each different method is a new challenge, such as editing video, creating a better, more unique theme.

Activity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgMvK_fmxXc&ab_channel=HeChunChuang

This week we played Volleyball friendlies against MAK and I also restarted to work on my vertical program after a really long break.

 

February CAS Reflection (1)

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Creativity

We finished the drawing, it took each of us 30 hours to create these 2! But all the effort was worth it in the end, because our drawing turns out really well. (Mine is the left one, Amelie’s drawing is the right one)

Throughout this process, Amelie and I had to communicate with each other and figure out which color would best fit with each other, each of us wanted to show a unique style in our own drawing to make it more interesting, we didn’t want these two to have the same color, what we wanted was to use different colors,  different style, yet the two drawings have to fit with each other.

This process also challenged my time management, throughout this week, I had a lot of school work, and I had to complete the drawing in one week too, the pressure motivated me to manage my time better.

Besides drawings, my Chinese classmates and I also prepared a short performance for the CNY celebration, I’m the cow on the left.

November CAS Reflection 1 (Creativity, Activity, Service)

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Creativity and Service

Charity Art Club Winter Sale Poster

Yujinia and I designed this poster for the upcoming Charity Art Club Winter Sale on 11/28, we will be donating all profits to HonDao Seniors Citizens Welfare Foundation, I want to donate to HonDao this time because I’ve been focusing on Taiwan’s elderly population issues and their life quality since 10th grade in my Personal Project. I connected with a volunteer at HonDao, I call her 玲姐 Mrs.Ling  (Below is our group photo lol. Left:Yujinia, Mid: Mrs.Ling, Right: Me) She dedicated the majority of her retirement days to Charity, she served in Drug Control Center, Jail, Senior Citizens Foundation, Orphanage center, and many more.

 

On 11/28, We will be hosting a winter sale, we will be mainly selling stickers and pins, further update will be in the next CAS reflection, the event requires short term planning, the document below is the Planning Document of our Winter Sale, for the planning, I believe it improves my ability on how to initiate plans, for example, I had to distribute jobs for the executives and gave them specific deadline. I also had to make certain decision with the executives such as the price of the stickers and pins. This time, the event has a better flow than last time, one thing we can still improve on is how to increase member’s engagement, and how to make members and executives want to contribute on their own instead of being asked to. I’m also aiming to make a working system for the executives to make everything more organized –> I believe I will have a more clear system by the end of November.

 

Activity

Yay, I made it to Basketball Varsity, for tryout, coach 謝玉娟 and I-SHOU University Players came to coach us, the tryout and practice was a new experience, and we were really honored to be coached by them, usually I could only see them on TV. The Tryout was three consecutive days, the exhaustion added up every day. And after that, we had to do our homework and prepare for summative, but I would say the morning basketball session I previously did helped me a little, since I woke up at around 4:30 – 5 during basketball session, I was used to waking up early from a mental aspect. So this time, I would sleep as soon as I got home, about 6-7 and wake up at around 3 to finish my homework. I realized doing homework in the morning is actually more productive, I barely spend anytime on my phone, because I knew that assignment is about to be turned in in 3-4 hours, unfortunately, I still missed few assignments, because it was hard to deeply concentrate for 4 straight hours. Through this tryout, I learned how to manage my time wisely based on the situation.

For practice, we have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, it’s also tiring but I don’t feel sleepy anymore when I went home. It’s still tough for me mentally, because you have to switch to study mode right after exercising, but I’m still learning.

CAS October Reflection 2 (Activity + Creativity)

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End October Reflection

Creativity

Recently, I have been listening to a song called 刻在我心底的名字, it is a theme song for the movie 刻在你心裡的名字, I really liked the song so I decided to draw something based on the movie, I referenced to the image on the left. This took me about an hour to make, it was really a fun a stress-relieving process. After a day of work, this was a good productive way to relieve myself. the process wasn’t really complicated, I put the reference image as the bottom layer and I outline the characters, then I turn them into my own style of art through coloring.

 

Activity

  • I continued my basketball session, I start from 5 and practice to 6:40 am, I practice on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
  • I played scrimmages every Saturday with Basketball Club

In October, I spent more time playing basketball, sometimes, I would practice twice a day, morning practice, afternoon scrimmage, and on Saturday, we would play scrimmage with very high intensity because the coach is there. My goal is to make Basketball Varsity this year. Regardless of the result, I will continue to practice basketball in the morning, because It benefits me from multiple ways rather just my basketball skills, my learning outcome for this CAS experience will be Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth, and Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences. 

What am I practicing:

This video is one of my practice day, this was filmed on Monday, on Monday, I was focusing on one single move, which is crossover, I was practice the footwork of it, and how to shift weight from left to right/right to left using my hips. I definitely improved a little, however, my dribbling is still not as shifty, because I can’t shift my weight to quickly, and my dribble is also a little laggy –> Reasons: Not explosive enough (Lack of Muscle Strength, Less Fast twitch muscle), Bad coordination because I can’t dribble low with fast speed.

I practiced dribbling for an hour, and for the next 40 minutes, I started my shooting drill as usual, I include shooting drill in every session because my target position for basketball team is small forward or shooting guard. So shooting accuracy is a crucial area I need to master.

My Experience:

I don’t feel tired anymore when I wake up, and I can automatically wake up at around that time. This has made my morning routine way better because sometimes if I have too much homework, I will choose to spend the morning to write my homework. This is why I choose to play on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Tuesday and Thursday are for studying, even if I don’t have homework that day, I will still wake up and do something else, because if I always wake up at different time, it will ruin my body clock and cause a lot of acne.

For my vertical program, I stopped this week to completely focus on Basketball, and I’m going to stop from November 1 to November 6th, because we have a basketball tryout week.

 

 

CAS October Reflection 1 (Service)

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Service

In my junior year, became president of Charity Art Club, and for the first event, we collaborated with Gin Club, together, we made 50+ hand drawn tote bags and sold all of them. Originally, we were going to donate the money to an elderly caring center 弘道老人基金會 located in Kaohsiung. However, after hearing what happened in Lebanon, we decided to donate all the profit to Lebanon as a relief fund. During our drawing sessions and club members meeting, we made a presentation that discusses more details about Lebanon and why the explosion happened.

Due to government corruption, we decided to donate the money to Lebanon Red Cross, despite the money was not much, but the we did raise awareness about the issue by allowing people to learn more information about Lebanon. I believe it was meaningful because majority of people, including me, didn’t know anything about Lebanon until the explosion, and after learning about the issue, majority of people just shared this on their social media, but barely know anything about Lebanon as a country.

Since this was my first event, I struggled a lot, I found it difficult to manage the schedule, and distribute jobs to executives, one thing I learned this time is that even if you have a plan and the schedule for the event, you need to make it even more detailed! It has to include basically everything,  I always thought leadership was easy, until I found out that there were so many problems I had to deal with, for example:

  1. it was really hard to form a plan beforehand
  2. hard to make some executives more productive
  3. hard to deal with divergence in opinions
  4. hard to distribute jobs

I was really happy because received over 30 designs and over 20 people signed up to draw the designs onto the tote bags, it showed how people were really enthusiastic about the event, which made me feel really accomplished. I learned so much in one event, so I’m looking forward to what I can learn from the following events.

Here are two of my favorite designs made by members (NOT BY ME)

Drawing sessions photos

 

 

 

CAS October Reflection 1 (Activity)

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Activity

  • Basketball
  • Continue Vertical Program
  • Basketball

I started to train for basketball last week, I decided to put my session in the morning around 5 to 6:30, this way I can play more frequently, since I will finish my school work and night, I also decided to play sport in the morning because I’m hoping it can motivate me for school and athletics, I felt really burned out in the last 3-4 weeks.

So here’s what I feel after a week of basketball practice: This week I only had three sessions because I want to slowly adapt to the schedule and perhaps increase the intensity, on the first day, I slept at 11 and woke up at 5, I felt really tired when I woke up and it took me around 20 minutes to prepare because I was really exhausted, however, I consumed some food that can be broken down quickly so I get re-energized around 20 minutes into the practice. At school, I get more motivated instead of feeling burned out other days. On the second day, I’m still really tired, I almost went back to sleep again, however, I feel way better as soon as I started playing, and I felt more productive in the morning because when I came back home, I could take a shower, make my own breakfast and prepare to go to school, this helps me to get more motivated for school. When I was training for velocity, I accidentally hurt my knee when I was measuring vertical on Wednesday (previous injury: jumper’s knee) (This time is very minor, I just need to rest for a few days), so on Thursday, I practiced shooting and dribble and condition (slow run).

 

  • Continued on my Vertical Program
    • Did more research
    • Started Training

Training reflection: I did reactive jumps, velocity training, and contrast training in the first week of October. Also in the first week (Saturday) I tried to dunk on 9’8, and my vertical decreased a lot with a basketball, I think it’s because my flexibility and coordination, my position is really awkward in mid air. And in the second week of October, I did velocity training during morning basketball session but then I hurt my knee so I stopped vertical training this week.

Current Vertical: 75 cm, I was going to measure vertical on Wednesday, but as I jumped, I felt my Patellar hurting again,  so I stopped immediately, I’m not sure how will my vertical be affected after this, so my current vertical is not very accurate since it has potential to decrease.

Vertical Program Document Research+Schedule

In the document, I mentioned that I had to test my 1RM, and it was 80 kg, 80% of 80 kg is 60kg, meaning I will be using 60kg to do squat, and after 2 minutes, I will do plyometrics. This is my 60kg squat: