Category: Grade 12 Sangfroid

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.

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.