CAS Essay

Over the IB years, I’ve taken part in uncountable CAS activities and have also had experiences that I’ll value in coming years. Such experiences have shaped me and made me into who I am today. Before getting involved with CAS, my life was solely composed of social events, school, and sport. CAS changed this. Faced with the incredible – at the beginning, that’s what it felt like – duty of completing 150 CAS hours, I didn’t immediately dive in. But after getting the idea, I jumped into the world of helping people and slowly discovered more about the world and myself. I can now say that it’s been a fantastic experience.

I started out joining sports teams. I knew I’d get action hours, and so focused the majority of IB’s first semester on playing two sports. It’s true that first semester was tiring; that I wanted to give up a few times, but I stuck with playing on both the varsity volleyball team (with practice 4 times a week) and the varsity football team (with practice also 4 times a week). There weren’t many games for the volleyball team (except ISSEA), but in football we had a season consisting of two games per week. With schoolwork on top of it, that semester was hectic. But I have to say that I still enjoyed it a lot. I like sports, and have a lot of fun when I play them. Sports have a way of allowing me to reduce my stress-level to a point where I no longer feel like everything is caving in on me. On top of this, playing sports also allowed me to get fitter than I had been anytime previously. I also started out year two with the same idea: playing two sports, with the inclusion of a bit more creativity and service hours as well. But things didn’t work out so well. I didn’t realize how hard the first semester of senior year would be. So early in the season, I decided to drop out of football, continuing only with volleyball. With fewer games, it was much easier for me to maintain my academic progress – however I could still take part in ISSEA, which meant a lot to me.

I didn’t start as well with my creativity hours. I was already a creative person with sound and vocal production talents, but could never figure a way where I could combine the two in a CAS project. Unfortunately I never found one, and had a hard time during my first year keeping up with creativity. But about ¾ through the second semester, someone mentioned the importance of being able to cook to me. This got me thinking: I have never been a good cook, but my mom has always been very good. I managed to put two-and-two together to create a project where I had cooking lessons from my mom. Not only was I learning skills that would be useful in coming years, but I was also able to bond with my mom. At first, I didn’t enjoy cooking and had to rely on my mom for direction. But a month after cooking weekly, I got the hang of it and have become better! I now cook weekly for my family.

I neglected service activities until halfway through the second semester, mainly because I had a lot going on. I regret this now, as it left me lots to do in my second year. But even then I never had a long-term service project. I didn’t join any of the school clubs as I had seen their work the previous semester, and honestly they weren’t doing much. Instead, I decided to set up a project with a small business in Kibera. I was able to help them improve their marketing schemes, as well as to develop some of their investment plans for the long run. But after a while, I realized I had done everything I could with them – halfway through the third semester I stopped working with them. I learnt a lot though – this helped me consistently since I’ve known them – and I think they learnt a lot as well. But since then I have only done small activities, which have benefitted numerous people, but not in the long run. Nonetheless I learnt much and am thankful for the opportunity to be able to take part in such a venture.

CAS has been a great experience. I’ve developed into a well-rounded person with my attitude to the world. It has also allowed me to get outside my comfort zone, as many of the activities in which I participated were not what I would have normally done. Over the last two years, I’ve realized that there’s more in me, and through CAS I’ve developed further as an individual.

Senior Trip

For our school senior trip, we went to Watamu on the Kenyan coast. I was part of the service strand, as i was very interested in helping out as much as i could in whatever way i could. It turns out that there was actually quite a lot to do. On the first day, i helped out in an attempt to clean up the beach as much as we could. Basically, we all got a big plastic bag, some plastic gloves and then we walked up and down the beach in groups looking for any sort of non-biodegradable items that may have somehow found their way onto the beach (usually through littering, though there was the occasional item that had washed up from the sea). We did our best, and took about 3 hours to get the beach looking almost brand new again (joke). To be honest, that felt very good, as i felt like i was helping out the entire local environment. Not only would the animals around the area be saved from death by choking, or some sort of poisoning, but also the beach looked much much much nicer when we were done. There was no longer any eyesores that took away from the pleasure of just chilling on the beach.
We also got the opportunity to help out at a local turtle watch. They actually had two turtles that they were taking care of which we were able to help out. Firstly, we helped clean their little enclosures, as they got pretty dirty. We also learnt the best way to clean and maintain a healthy turtle, as well as their environment. This was very interesting as i had never really even ever been that close to a turtle, let alone taken care of it - it was much easier than i thought it would be. Still challenging, but they are not picky animals, and when treated with care they seem to accept anything that comes their way (I never knew this).

We also got the rare chance to release the two turtles back into the wild, which was AMAZING! Just the feeling of helping them out on their last day was very nice, and them watching them go to restart their lives - a chance of a lifetime.