First of all…
Year 1 of my CAS journey is coming to an end… And honestly, I just feel extremely proud of my progress throughout the years. I have completed numerous activity, service, and creativity based experiences, and I HAVE to tell you… I have certainly become a better open-minded, caring, and balanced person thanks to these activities.
The two most impressive activities that I have completed throughout the year were a GIN club activity with eco-bricks as well as my current long-term fitness plan. As for the eco-bricks activity, I was shocked about how much recyclable trash we generate each day. What’s more shocking though was that most of them were not recycled properly and instead were just burned just like ordinary trash. I’m extremely grateful to take part in this activity so that I can help reduce the amount of recyclable trash that don’t get recycled every year, and these eco-bricks can truly benefit those who wanted some cheap, environmentally-friendly ways to build something, and our mother Earth as well. You can read more about it in my blog post here.
This GIN activity allowed me to become an open-minded and caring person as this had a significant impact on my views on this trash crisis. I didn’t realize that we humans have generated that much recyclable trash that could be properly recycled but didn’t receive the necessary treatments for them to be reused until now. This transformed me into a more environmentally-caring person and with it, environmentalist ideas as well.
On the other hand, I am currently on a long-term CAS experience that was focused on decreasing my weight over a period of 1 year. That proved problematic at the beginning, in which I couldn’t afford that many exhaustive speed-walks in a week (that would prove too much for me). I only completed like less than 30 speed-walk sessions since I started this long-term experience, and that, complicated by a 2-week period of no workouts due to the Spring Break, I had totally no progress by then. In fact, I even gained some weight at that time. Seeing that continue doing that will not be beneficial to my plan, I decided to switch my plan up a little bit: complimenting my speed-walk sessions with jump rope each day. (The speed-walk sessions were abandoned after we went into digital days as a result of rising COVID cases here in Taiwan.) I hope that this new plan will help decrease my weight a little bit.
That demonstrates the importance of beforehand planning when we plan long-term CAS experiences. I didn’t had a chance to plan more activities before I started my long-term CAS experience, and that meant that I would constantly need to alter my plans a little bit if my previous plan didn’t work out well. If I sophistically planned the entire experience beforehand, I wouldn’t need to do so in the future. That’s one big lesson that I learned throughout the year through this long-term experience.
In addition, this long-term CAS experience allowed me to become a more balanced person because in most cases, we cannot balance between our health and our academics due to the amount of work we have each day. Well, this activity was specifically designed to allow me to be active even when we are stressed about future exams and tasks. Research has shown that workouts can help reduce stress, and I am glad that this experience has allowed to become balanced between my study and my body health in this extremely stressful times.
Speaking of that, I will be updating my June status in my next blog post. Stay tuned!
I am extremely grateful to be part of this wonderful journey. It has truly enabled me to become a better person in every way. Oh yeah, these reflection blog posts have allowed me to become a better communicator as well. (Though I’ll be trying new reflection techniques in the next few posts 😉😉😉) Let me tell you… CAS experiences are DEFINITELY more interesting and fun than regular community services. I can’t wait to repeat this year’s journey next year!