Category: Manan Sanjay Shah

Hi my name is Manan Shah and I am in grade 12, surviving IB at Fountainhead school. Personally I believe in Carpe-Diem living the life to its fullest as life is short and unpredictable. I am inspired by many characters which appear on television such as Jon Snow. They have inspired me to do the right thing in life and follow my heart. In nature I am an introvert, I think introversion is one of my greatest abilities as it helps me focus on minute details in life and I can introspect and all the small and big matters in life. However this does not mean I do not talk to people, I am quite close to my friends and family.  

My area of talents are sports and learning new things.  I am highly dedicated towards my sport Karate and I constantly keep honing my skills. Also I think Karate has improved my power of concentration which has also helped me academics. Karate constantly creates new challenges for me in ways of competition and learning and developing new skills. The other skill i have is to learn new things. I am always ready and enthusiastic to learn new skills in the my area of interest. Like recently I took up the challenge of learning a new computer language, Python.

Well there are a variety of things which I enjoy. Firstly i love watching movies and tv shows, I can go all day and night watching my favorite tv shows and movies. Also I really like travelling to new places, as I am quite passionate about exploring, as it adds thrill to my life. I like to listen to music and explore different genres in music. I listen to soundtracks created by music composers, they are like symphonies. I also enjoy reading comics I especially love comics by DC Comics as they have my favorite super-heros.

I would like to work on the area of arts as I am not so good at it. I would especially want to sharpen my keyboard skills. Also i would like to develop new skills in visual arts.

I would like to be involved in projects which have more of service components as I want to work for the betterment of the society. Society has given us so much so I would want to repay it in any form.

I am quite optimistic in nature. I think we all have one life so why not live it to its fullest, Carpe Diem. I am also a feeler, so my emotions has more significance in my life. I am also quite punctual, I like to complete all my work before all the deadlines and not procrastinate them.

I think education is one of the most imperative issues in my society, many children do not receive education or quality education. I think this is one of the biggest issues in our society and we need to do something about it.

I would like to learn different computer languages such as C#, Ruby, Pearl, Java and others. As computer is a growing field I think it is important to learn all these languages as they will help me in our near future.

There are couple of things in life I want to try such as adventure activities like bungee jumping, skydiving, cliff jumping, scuba diving and advanced level river rafting.

 

 

 

According to me the best CAS activity I have been part of is Fizz. Fizz was founded by my friend and I in order to provide quality education and doubt solving for students in the field of Physics. The hard work and commitment we showed for this activity according to me was commendable. We planned the syllabus we made felicitous notes for the users/students and we used innovative ideas to teach Physics. Not only that we provided a platform where users/students could solve their doubt and also test their knowledge by appearing for a quiz. This is one of the most impressive tasks i have pulled because I successfully balanced my life between my academics, Fizz and other extra curricular activities.

CAS is not just an IB core rather it is a platform where students can explore and learn new things while exploring. During my CAS experience I have learnt a lot of things however the most significant one is that how nature is quite vital in maintaining the natural balance on earth. Also how if you give heartily to nature it will always give you back. This lesson is one of the strongest things I have learnt during CAS activities like Tree plantation at KV college and our winter trip to the enchanted valley of Naggar. I can connect this lesson with the IB learner profile as now I am more reflective about my activities which cause disturbance to nature. Also I have developed the quality of caring for nature as we need to protect it. I have spent a lot of time dwelling inside nature ‘open-mindedly’ which allowed me to gain the ‘knowledge’ about how it functions.

While exploring different fields in CAS I realised that I had good artistic skills where I could draw and sketch art pieces and I believe that i could further use these skills in my future life. Also while doing CAS activities with my friends I have developed skills of working in a synergy also while working a group people tend to have a pessimistic viewpoint however I have realised optimism is more powerful and helpful to maintain human relationships and to achieve certain goals. What I have learnt about others is that everybody is different and unique in their own sense and we need to be open minded about it and accept people the way they are.

In the activity learning camps I had to teach small children, well they are not easy to deal with so i built a lot of composure to tackle them. This has helped me tackle any situation in life with tranquility. The overall CAS experience was smooth but we all have had some had hard times during the entire experience. One of the toughest was managing time. During one of my activities the learning camps i had to stay back at school and teach ICT to the nearby village students. Staying back every day would have hindered my academics so I decided to split up the teaching load so that I had to stay back on some particular days only. My friends helped me to do so.

The most difficult one was the global significance outcome. Well to do an activity which has global impact and significance is difficult as all those activities need high level of determination and commitment. But then I soon realised that small steps towards global awareness is possible, so we arranged learning camps in order to battle the lack of IT education problem.

CAS has been a very beautiful journey for me. I have learnt a lot and in the end I feel eternally happy to give something back to the society. So for these strong moments of happiness and self satisfaction I would love to continue these activities even when I grow up and go for higher level education.

Timestamp	Activity Name	Describe the activity which you would like to propose	CAS Advisor	Activity type	Location	What are the learning outcomes that will be demonstrated through this activity	List the goals related to this activity
9/7/2015	Karate	“I am Doing Karate for 5 years and i am a black belt but this time i am participating in the school games a government cometition”	krishna.shethji@fountainheadschools.org	Activity	Out-of-school	Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth, Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills, commitment to and perseverance	Go till National level.
3/22/2016	Book Club	Book club is an initiative by our school where students have to take part in the activity of reading and develop a habit of it. We need to read a number of book over the year and after reading each book we need to give a reflection to our teachers about the book we read.	krishna.shethji@fountainheadschools.org	Creativity	Out-of-school, In-school	Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth, Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills, commitment to and perseverance,	Read 5 books of teachers choice over the year Make nice and insightful presentation
3/22/2016	Learning Python on Codecademy	Computers have become an integral part of our lives, now we are literally surrounded by it everywhere and that’s why it is important to learn things about computers. By learning the language Python i am preparing for the future where Computers would be very important part of our life and this will make it easy to learn computers.	krishna.shethji@fountainheadschools.org	Creativity, Activity	Out-of-school	Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth, Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills, initiate and plan a CAS experience, commitment to and perseverance	Complete the free version of the course
3/22/2016	Debate competition	Inter-house competition of debate between two houses. The topic was – Capitol punishment for and against.	krishna.shethji@fountainheadschools.org	Creativity, Activity	In-school	Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth, Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills, commitment to and perseverance, Collaboration, engagement with issues of global significance, Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions	Try and win the debate competition enhance public speaking skills Think of creative arguments
10/1/2016 18:34:20	Tree Plantation @ K.V Central school	Planting numerous and different types of tree as KV central school and create an awareness about how nature is important for us to survive and we can conserve nature by best planting trees.	krishna.shethji@fountainheadschools.org	Service	Out-of-school	Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth, Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills, commitment to and perseverance, Collaboration, engagement with issues of global significance, Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions	We will be focusing on the depleting plants inour society and work on the issue.
	Thefizzway	Is in an initiative by me where i use the internet to teach physics to people who struggle in the subject.	krishna.shethji@fountainheadschools.org	Creativity, Service	Out-of-school, In-school	Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth, Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills, initiate and plan a CAS experience, commitment to and perseverance, Collaboration, engagement with issues of global significance, Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions	Upload as many chapters to ensure quality learning for our target audience.
3/10/2017 19:23:21	Learning camps	Learning camps is an initiation by me where we where we teach different subjects such as ICT, English and Character Building to the underprivileged children near our school.	krishna.shethji@fountainheadschools.org	Service	In-school	Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth, Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills, initiate and plan a CAS experience, commitment to and perseverance, Collaboration, engagement with issues of global significance	Create a full proof curriculum for the ICT team. Make sure that all the classes are fruitful for the children Try and achieve more attendance of the students.

 

Access to quality education is a human right yet many are deprived of it. Education is quite vital for human beings because it does not just teach us about how the world works it also provides a path to success. I always wanted to contribute to the society for making it a better place so I thought what better than educating children. “Learning Camp” was an initiation by me and my friends where we taught the underprivileged students near our school different subjects such as English, ICT and character building. During the entire experience we faced a lot of difficulties. The first challenge we faced was how will we approach the underprivileged children because going to each and every house in the village was not a feasible option we decided to keep an introductory session with the parents of the children. The session was organized in the school where we persuaded all the parents to send their children for the camps and we ensured that that these camps would be fruitful for the children as they will learn new skills in different areas. I personally did not expect that the parents would be keen to send their children after long hours of school however it turns out I was wrong the parents were more than happy because they wanted that their children should learn new skills in subject like ICT.

After gathering several volunteers from our school we divided all the volunteers in three groups according to the subject we will teach which were ICT, English and Character Building. I was in charge of the ICT. We began with learning camps. During the time when I taught the children I found out that I had good leadership skills in me because I was able to handle approximately students and could make sure that children would always learn something new and helpful in the field of ICT. Also collaboratively with the other volunteers I designed a four week curriculum for the children which included learning about how internet works, how to create email id’s and some basics about computer programming. During learning camps I was able to learn new skills myself. I was able to learn new Gujarati words and could further improve my Gujarati while constantly communicating with children in the language. One of the biggest challenge during the learning camps was time management, as the learning camps took place after school hours I needed to stay back and because I reached home late I was not able to study so I decided to use some extra time in school such as free slots to ensure that my academics is not affected. Overall learning camps was one of my best experience because I learnt that there is no age for learning.

 

Sunday mornings usually are very lazy for me, I wake up late and take a lot of rest however this Sunday was different. Me and my friends decided to go for tree plantation, we kept our laziness aside and wanted to work for conserving nature and showed dedication for this activity by reaching for the plantation on time. With advancing time nature is constantly depleting and all my friends thought we need to do something about it. And then came this beautiful opportunity to serve nature. What best activity we can possibly perform to preserve nature? Planting trees! The tree plantation activity was the initiation of Nature Club a prominent environmental organization.

After completing the activity I can say I have successfully developed a new skill which is “Environmental care”. Initially I was not comfortable being around mud because it made me feel disgust and I felt dirty. As the whole activity of tree plantation revolves around mud, I started regretting my decision of coming for this activity however as I thought about the greater good that I will be able to plat trees so I decided to work in the mud and I actually felt really great about it. I started liking the idea of working in mud.

The biggest problem I faced was when I decided to plant bamboos. Bamboos needs to injected into the soil deep. For doing that I needed to hit the bamboo with big rocks and push the bamboo deep in the soil. However after each push injecting the bamboo deeper in the soil became hard. Also I cut my hands while hitting the bamboo with rock. However after multiple attempts I thought the task became easy and I almost felt that I had mastered a new skill.  After sometimes I felt tires so I decided to take help from one of the member of nature club and some of my friends. With our combined efforts we successfully planted around 15 bamboos.

While planting some of the tress we needed to remove the plastic wrapping it had on its roots. All of my friends felt lethargic while planting the trees so we removed the plastic wrapping and threw it in the mud. But then our ethics and morals came in between and we thought that it would be hypocrisy as one side we are planting trees and on the other side polluting the same soil with the plastic. So we collected all the plastic in one place and threw it in a bin.

During this activity the member of nature club taught us about plantation of plants in detail. Also I see how this activity has a global consideration as I am working for nature which is facing threat globally. With all my small steps I am trying to make an impact in preserving nature. As we know the saying “Many water drops collectively make an ocean!”

 

I participated in the Inter House Debate Competition that was a part of the Literature and Humanities Fest. The topic of the debate was “Capital Punishment” and our house had to speak against the topic.

 

This was a new challenge for me as I was not confident of my public speaking and debating skills however the competition gave me the opportunity to enhance these skills. I believe these skills are a crucial part of our lives. However, it was hard for me to talk against this topic as I found capital punishment justified for major heinous crimes. So finding something to speak against it, I had to focus on the ethical implication of capital punishment and how it is unjust on the emotional level. This gave me the opportunity to shift my method of analyzing content, now I found the emotional arguments in real life situations.

Working with a team was different experience as in usual debates I had to work alone, but this time I worked collaboratively with my team. This way I was exposed to a bunch of new ideas which I possibly could not think of. Working collaboratively also made our work even more productive as we had more points from everyone and each one of the member worked on a different sector of the team, for example I worked on rebuttals, others worked on collection suitable examples and etc.

According to me I showed perseverance for this competition as for a week I collected as much data possible on the topic I also thought of arguments which the opposite team could come with and I analysed the rebuttals for those arguments. I also was also like a mentor to the young members in the team and I pushed them to do more efficient research.

The topic of the debate dealt with an issue of global significance itself. The act of capital punishment is a very debatable topic and also a sensitive one due to the ethical considerations of killing a person. Working on it and evaluating the best course of action dealt with the global significance.

 

Computers have become an integral part of our lives, now we are literally surrounded by it everywhere and that’s why it is important to learn things about computers. One of the major aspects people learn about computers is computer language and programming. So I decided to learn the computer language Python and use it to do programming. This will help me in my future and I will also learn new set of computing skills. From the beginning I was passionate about computers and learning new things about it this also helped me to take this to initiative to learn Python. Using the website codecademy I started learning the language. Initially it seemed pretty easy, doing an exercise daily was not so tough however as I progressed the language became difficult and the exercises became even tougher. This activity was difficult because I did not have a room for actually clarifying my doubts by a teacher. I had to independently search all my doubts on internet and do the exercises. I had the room for cheating while solving exercises by copying programmes from the internet but it didn’t and worked honestly. One more thing was difficult was time management because we had a lot assignments from school sometimes it was hard to manage time and do my exercises, but i made a timetable for myself which helped me organize my activity and kept productivity on top form. After completing 50% of the course I found out that the other half is paid so I was not able to continue. However whatever I learnt helped me with other exercises kept online. This course of programming not only taught me new skill also improved my mathematical and analytical skills. It made me more focused in a way, as when we have a bug in a programme we have to look carefully and find the bug out.

Computers have become an integral part of our lives, now we are literally surrounded by it everywhere and that’s why it is important to learn things about computers. One of the major aspects people learn about computers is computer language and programming. So i decided to learn the computer language Python and use it to do programming. This will help me in my future and i will also learn new set of computing skills. From the beginning i was passionate about computers and learning new things about it this also helped me to take this to initiative to learn Python. Using the website codecademy i started learning the language. Initially it seemed pretty easy, doing an exercise daily was not so tough however i as i progressed the language became difficult and the exercises became even tougher. This activity was difficult because i did not have a room for actually clarifying my doubts by a teacher i had to independently search all my doubts on internet and do the exercises. I had the room for cheating while solving exercises by copying programmes from the internet but i didn’t and worked honestly. One more thing was difficult was time management because we had a lot assignments from school sometimes it was hard to manage time and do my exercises, but i made a timetable for myself which helped me organize my activity and kept productivity on top form. After completing 50% of the course i found out that the other half is paid so i was not able to continue. However whatever i learnt helped me with other exercises kept online. This course of programming not only taught me new skill also improved my mathematical and analytical skills. It made me more focused in a way, as when we have a bug in a programme we have to look carefully and find the bug out.

“No Pain, No gain” the quote suggests that if you do not go under pain you would never gain your goals. This quote holds true for my life. Every year the Indian government organizes the school games tournament, it is a huge tournament publicly supported and run by the government. This year I had the opportunity to participate in the school games tournament in the sports Karate. I have been doing Karate since I was in grade  and I have also received my black belt. But this year I was aiming to achieve something above the belts, I was aiming to achieve to represent my state in the national tournament of Karate. Since July 31st I have been training as hard as possible, trained about 4 hours every day and on the weekends I used to train for 5 hours with some special endurance and stamina building training. I also had to keep control over my weight as I played in a specific weight category of 60-65 Kgs. I also had to make my diet more strict and apt enough to give me strength to survive the training sessions.

With the training received by my coach I cleared the district level. Now was the time when the real challenge came up. Clearing the states is never easy tough and brutal opponents come and I have to face them and overcome my fear. This time, due to rigorous practice I was able to clear the states. It was not easy my opponents were competent and give me quite a challenge. With clearing the states, a lot of responsibility fell on my shoulders of both academics and sports. However, I managed both and balanced such that nothing was compromised. After clearing the states I had to train even harder as Nationals are really really tough. This was my first ever nationals so I was scared. During my first fight, i saw my opponent and was frightened as he was tall broad and muscular where I was quite small in front of him. This fear took control of me, which made me lose my first fight at Nationals and I was knocked out. However, I was not upset because reaching to a stage like this is even a big achievement and I decided to learn from my experience.