Essay

The IB Diploma CAS program has enormously changed my outlook on what impact the smallest of activities could have on the people around me. When I think of the CAS activities that I have performed, the first thing, that comes to my mind is an intra-city cycling even that I, along with 2 classmates, had organized named ‘Ride With Pride’. We brought together the citizens of Surat to work towards a healthier lifestyle and promote cycling as a recreative and health beneficial sport. Calling together such a large number of people in the city to join us at a given location, date and time, coming up with creative marketing ideas to convince them to take a break from their schedules, to join us to serve the environment that we live in and promote cycling as a part of that action was a great feat and its accomplishment felt impressive. CAS has helped me develop a socio-cultural understanding and my duty towards the environment that I live in. It has also helped me enhance a certain skill set by constantly encouraging me to think and work creatively and perform actions that would benefit me along with my surroundings. Creativity as a component has inspired me to be more open-minded and welcoming to ideas and theories and the application of these has also made me approach some ideas with an uncertainty of their result and yet help me come up with innovative ways to go about daily things with to maximize that good that comes out of it. Action as the second component helped me enhance my communicative skills with MUN’s and debates and thus has helped me widen my horizons as a thinker and an inquirer. It has also taught me how to be balanced in everything I do since I was presented with many situations that required a decision to be made. I might not have made those decisions right at that point but at a later stage, when I sat to reflect on how the issue was handled, I believe that I learned a balanced way of evaluating situations which will help me later. And it was this thought that inspired my service activities. I began to realize the consequences of certain actions on the others in the society, eg. dumping garbage on the road. It made me express compassion for the less fortunate, respect for the ones that help us and a certain sense of responsibility towards the environment. Overall, CAS helped me become more knowledgeable and understanding about me and my surroundings. Through these activities, I learned that certain selfish actions might benefit us in the short-term but in the long-term, being someone who is empathetic and provides for the greater good is beneficial for everyone and requires little effort. I learned that leadership is an essential characteristic and making use of that ability helped me gain a greater insight on teamwork. I conditioned myself to always help someone in need as service is the greatest cause. Over the time, various CAS activities like playing football, participating in MUN’s as the Executive Board and many others helped me help people learn and share my skills with them. This way, I learned how to perform my duties better and they gained knowledge. However, there were always certain setbacks that required to be dealt with, with a calm mind. When the planning process in an event I was organizing hit a snitch, I asked a colleague to help me out with a dealer who threatened to not provide us with the supplies we needed. The full payment had been made and hence, this colleague negotiated with the dealer on my behalf to help continue the event. This effort on his part contributed greatly to the event and both of us learned a great deal about teamwork and efforts through this. The learning outcome regarding undertaking new challenges seemed to be one of the most difficult to achieve since it always involves unfamiliar territory and dealing with new things and people. Being an extrovert, I did not face many difficulties in dealing with new people, however, exploring something that I did not excel at provided a bit of a struggle. However, in the end, I was successfully able to perform on the stage without faltering or making any mistakes. My overall exquisite experience with CAS makes me want more people to be introduced to it and provide a helping hand in development, evolution, and conservation of our earth.