CAS 2017

By now, I had decided what career I wished to pursue. School gave us an opportunity to get an exposure to work with successful people and get to know about their jobs. I had applied for it and got to work with Ar. Abhishek Bhansali and Ar. Minal Bhansali at Span Design Organisation for a month roughly. Overall it was an amazing experience which made me confident to opt for this field and not any other field. I felt the difference between my perception about this career field before and after this internship. This internship means a lot to me because the things that I learnt here, the perspective shift that I experienced was amazing. This was the first step toward my journey from a student to an Architect. The early days went reading different books and knowing about the field. Getting book knowledge and exposure was one way to learn and open the doors of creativity. Being an anti-reader it was a little difficult for me to go about it. But then, I thought about perceiving it visually and getting to know about different structures, pros and cons of designing children bedrooms etc. After that, I got to do practical learning as well, where I accompanied some employees there to the site and measured all the bathrooms at the site. It wasn’t easy, I had to climb till the 8-9th floor using the staircase as the site wasn’t built and there was no elevator, then walking around all the dirt and cement, water spilled and other fragments lying all over the floor to take measurements.  I learnt to be patient as well, I learnt that when you are learning something, the process won’t be easy, there will be a lot of difficulties that we have to face which requires patience and the zest of learning. Then, I was also taught to read different plans and know some basic terms about the field which are spoken. There, I came across to “Vastu Shastra”, which can regard them as ethics or rules that need to be considered according to the client’s beliefs. The most interesting part was to have interactive sessions with Minal Ma’am and get to know her journey and experience. I asked different questions and she answered all of them which helped me to get a better understanding and vanish my misconceptions and other myth about the field. I went with Abhishek Sir and one of his client for material selection. I got to know different properties of Marble and Granite. How they are different not only by other looks but their properties and purposes as well. We visited a shop where there not other materials like wood, ply, veneer, neolith, mdf etc. which had their unique looks and purposes. After all this, I was given an internship task to design a bathroom space according to the requirements. By the end of the task, I had to prepare a presentation about the experience and also present my idea about the task. There were different flaws that I came across which Minal Ma’am explained me and then I worked upon it and by the end of the task.Coming to what I learnt about myself is that I realised interiors was my strength at this stage as I got more exposure about it than architecture and what I learnt about other (Sir, mam and employees) is that determination and hardwork is what counts at the end. Till yesterday, I knew what field I will go in my future. By now, I know what I will be doing in my coming future.

My friend and I volunteered for an eye-check up camp that was conducted by Rotary Club of Udhna in Navnirman school where hundreds of unprivileged students, especially teenagers . This service project has immensely helped these children in terms of their vision. Out of these hundreds of children, minimum 20-25% of children had poor vision, but had lack of money and knowledge. By this service project, these teens were benefitted as the ones who had a defect in their vision, were given professional checkup and eye-glasses were donated to them too.

Gujarati was the only language that could understand. But, there were some students who couldn’t even comprehend that. So, in that case we had to use actions and gestures in order to make them go to an assigned place for the checkup. But this way I also developed a skill to communicate without a certain language. All it takes a an expression to convey a message. This was a difficulty that I faced. It was very difficult to make students

Except for helping in volunteering there wasn’t much that we could do about it as we aren’t qualified enough to check whether there a defect in their eyes or not. But when we saw the difficulty they had to read the alphabets was heart breaking. There was this one girl who was asked whether or not she has specs or not, she said she but she doesn’t wear them because her classmates make fun of her. This gave a big shock to all of us present there. So, then it was decided that after all the required eye check-up, there will be a session with these student where in they will be given knowledge about so as why wearing eyeglasses is important and other important factors.

We realised that there is nothing more important than acquiring basic knowledge about our body. Seeing those children in these problems was heart throbbing.

This eye checkup camp has immensely helped these students and I feel glad to be a part of this.

Doing a random act of kindness for the society is one of the best feeling ever. In past, I did different service activities but this activity was different than other activities in my CAS portfolio as this was for the first time I spent time with kids with different sort of inabilities. I knew about different NGO and different organisations working for these kind of children but I had never experienced how it was like to spend time with them. Starting with a prayer, I noticed all of these children singing their daily prayers with all their feelings wishing for a happy and peaceful life. I started off my day by learning that happiness isn’t just in good marks you bring or good things you achieve in life. Happiness can be found in such small things like a prayer. And that’s when I knew that there are hundreds of reason to be sad about but always one reason to be happy about and that one reason leads us to have a joyful life. After the prayers we did different activities with these children. As friendship’s day was round the corner, we had an activity with them where they were asked to make friends belts by themselves. So, I taught them how we could do it, and then helped them do it as well. I found happiness in teaching these people and i felt happy to see their zest for learning different new things despite of the negatives they had. I realised that apart from these enthusiasm for learning and finding happiness in small things, what made them the happiest was the feeling of being accepted, the feeling of having different friends. In the current society, these children do not have friends or relatives who visit them, they are confined to certain people only. So, i liked making this change and not only make these people happy, but also to do something better for the society. In all the problem that we encountered was communication and mixing up with them. It wasn’t easy for me to get hold with new people and communicate with them. But then, I learnt doing this with the help of different activities. What I thought was that these children probably have their own flaws but these children are equally capable of achieving pinnacles in life. This experience was a great learning and motivation for me. I learnt that passion and enthusiasm to learn can lead us to great paths in life. Overall, my first experience was very special.