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CAS Reflections
sophistry#6845
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Table of contents

Ropes course 3

Going to the gym - completing the 24 week ‘Pete Plan’ 3

Amnesty International - stopping the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar 3

Amnesty International - Write for Rights campaign 4

NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month 5

Shout! magazine 6

Organising a tournament for an online game 7

Young Enterprise - [removed to avoid dox] 9

IB CAS day - Ufton Court 10

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Ropes course
Before school, the IB cohort went on a trip to an activity centre where we were introduced to the IB
program and took part in some fun physical activities. One of these was a problem-solving activity
where we simply had to get from one area to another using planks that we had to walk across without
touching the ground. This was made difficult by the fact that there were fewer planks than people.

Our first attempt was rushed and our strategy was not communicated well to the entire group, thus
we ended up losing some planks and not being able to reach the end. We decided to take a different
approach and communicate clearly with each other on each movement. We were also more verbally
and physically supportive by asking of people were okay, encouraging them, and offering any free
hands to hold if we had them, which meant we were able to communicate more clearly and calmly.

Going to the gym - completing the 24 week ‘Pete Plan’

I wanted to take on some exercise and increase my stamina to maintain my health. Although I go to
the gym frequently, I rarely actually push myself out of my comfort zone and develop my physical self.
Therefore, I decided to research different plans to help me, as a beginner/amateur, increase my
stamina on the rowing machine. I found the 24 week ‘Pete Plan’
(https://thepeteplan.wordpress.com/beginner-training/) which is aimed at beginner to intermediate
rowers. I accepted that I probably won’t complete it in 24 weeks, as I am a complete beginner and
only rowed casually; this was helpful to keep in mind when I was losing motivation to push myself.

It was very much challenging, both physically and mentally - but each session felt so rewarding and
refreshing. I kept this in mind when trying to motivate and discipline myself to keep going and
persevere. Once I had gotten through the dread (which varied greatly) and actually got on the rowing
machine and started, it was much easier to keep going. My stamina greatly increased, too - both
physically, in having to row much further distances, and mentally, in continuing and pressing forward.
Each new challenge, each further distance, enabled me to (gradually) take on more difficult
challenges and much further distances.

Amnesty International - stopping the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar

As a member of the Amnesty International club, I (and several others) gave an assembly to younger
years about the pressing issue of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. In writing the script and creating the
presentation, we had to make sure that it was suitable and understandable for the younger years
(especially in terms of being ethically safe and not too traumatising), which was a bit difficult - the
issue is fairly complicated for a 12 year old to understand - but to us, this meant that it was even
more important for them to learn about it earlier so that they can become more aware. It was a very
rewarding experience - everyone in the team contributed something to the presentation and had
something to say, and we met up during lunch and break times (which was easily organised through
Facebook Messenger as not all of us had free periods at the same time) over a couple of weeks to
rehearse with each other.

The multiple times we rehearsed the assembly also helped me with my nerves regarding public
speaking - at first, I wanted to only work on the presentation (‘behind the scenes’), as this was my
strength, but not actually perform it, which was an area which needed a lot of improvement. However,
the rest of the group encouraged me to challenge myself and be part of the actual presentation. The
continuous practice we did meant that I was more confident in knowing what I was saying, which then
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meant that I was a little more confident speaking in front of dozens of people. I was able to ‘channel’
my fear of public speaking into my passion for raising awareness about the pertinent issue.

Our hard work very much paid off - our audience was visibly interested and shocked by the atrocity of
the issue. We felt that it was important for them to be able to do something about it and take action,
so in our presentation and through posters around school, we encouraged people to sign the petition
on the Amnesty website. We booked an ICT suite during lunch time so that people could simply come
for a few minutes to sign their name. We also went round form rooms to let people know in person,
as we found that quite a few people just couldn’t be bothered to walk to an ICT suite. This was a
helpful learning experience - I suggested that in the future, we could use the form room computers
instead, as well as bringing laptops around with us.

In that single hour, we managed to get around 100 individual signatures, which was very exciting and
rewarding to see, as it meant that those 100 people were deeply intrigued by the materials we had
promoted and were willing to take action and make a difference. Afterwards, as a group, we all felt
very satisfied and happy with the work we had done and it was a hugely fulfilling bonding experience.
We recognised how important teamwork was, as we wouldn’t have been able to do so much work
without each other - everyone was needed in preparing and giving the presentation, and everyone
helped in gaining support and signatures from other students.

Amnesty International - Write for Rights campaign

Another project I was part of in Amnesty International was the ‘Write for Rights’ campaign. This
involved writing letters to victims of injustice, to provide words of support, encouragement, and love. I
and the rest of the group gave two assemblies about this campaign: one to younger years and one to
the rest of the school. As in the Myanmar campaign, we still had to make sure it was understandable
for the younger audience, but this was easier to do as the topic was simpler and we had more
learning experience from the first assembly. Again, everyone contributed and had something to say in
the assembly; we communicated a lot through our Facebook group chat and organised times to
practise together. Thanks to my previous experiences, I felt much more confident in giving this
assembly, even during the second one which was performed in the huge Richards Hall and in front of
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most of the school as well as many teachers. Of course, I was still a little nervous, but once we had
gotten a few minutes into the presentation, I felt fine and as if we were simply rehearsing again.

The assembly was so successful and powerful that my English Language teacher was inspired to
write a letter of her own, as well as dedicate a lesson for us students to write a letter for the
campaign! This was so rewarding to see - raising awareness about an issue through just one
assembly resulted in so much action being taken. From past experience with the Myanmar petition,
we anticipated that people might not have time or be bothered to come to the Amnesty sessions
(which were during lunchtime every Monday for four weeks) to write, so we made a postbox and
placed it by the library for people to post their letters at their leisure. This proved very helpful - only a
handful of people turned up at each Amnesty session, but by the end of the campaign the box was
very nearly full of letters!

NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month

I decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month, an online community and task of writing a
50,000-word novel in 30 days. I had read and observed other people online taking part in this, but
have always been too scared to even attempt it. This year I decided to just go for it, setting my
expectations low to account for how formidable this task was. I tried to write as much as I could every
day, but did not anticipate how difficult it would be to balance it with homework and continue to come
up with further developments in the plot and ended up writing just over ⅓ of the word count. I would
love to try again in the future (when my workload is not as big), but try to plan out a bit more of my
story (obviously accounting for how the story may change as I write it) in order to have a better idea
of where my story is going so that I don’t feel so lost.
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Shout! magazine
I joined the sixth form magazine (Shout!) team as the editor. In this role, I oversaw and collaborated
with all the talented members of the team over the long process of brainstorming ideas, working on
them, refining them, and eventually putting them all together in a fantastically designed magazine.
Throughout this process, I definitely recognised the value of collaborating - everyone was important
and contributed significantly to the magazine, and without one person or one article the magazine
would definitely not be as good as the final product. Additionally, I also developed my ability to
actually collaborate, particularly in a leadership role where I had to give feedback to others. For
example, in editing and giving feedback to the writers, I had to make sure that I was being
constructive and encouraging with my feedback - all of them were talented and had written great
articles, and I did not want the minor (and easily fixable) flaws in their articles to overshadow this.
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Organising a tournament for an online game

Around the end of the year (during November and December) I was an important member in
organising an online tournament for a video game which took place in January. This process involved
multiple meetings with my other ‘teammates’, working out the logistics and organisation of the
tournament - the players would be from all around the world, so what would be the best time to
accommodate all the time zones? There will inevitably be people who do not show up, so how many
people should we allocate to each team to ensure there are sufficient substitutes? Some players are
much better than others, some players prefer a specific role in the video game, so how do we
accommodate all their needs so that teams are balanced and well-rounded in terms of their players?
These are all things we spent a lot of time discussing and debating.

There are several big obstacles I encountered from this experience:

1. A lot of people did not read the entire announcements in our community chatroom, and so
did not give all the information I needed to register them.
It became quite frustrating to tell people the same thing - to read the announcement fully - and it was
difficult at times to stay polite. I had to recognise and accept that some of these people were younger,
many were from all around the world and spoke English as a second language. However, I really
wanted to make sure people had read and understood all the information - if they skipped some
information, such as “teams will not be balanced - they will be randomly allocated” or even the time of
the event, things could become very messy very quickly. Therefore, I decided to employ an ‘attention
check’ tactic, which was to put a random word in square brackets somewhere in the middle of the
information, and (at the end of the announcement) ask for them to “include the word in square
brackets []”. This was a little more successful, but I still had some people messaging me without
including the word, and some of these people told me that they weren’t sure what square brackets
meant, which was even more frustrating. I think if I were to do this again, it would have been better to
have a simple form for all the information, as well as questions to check comprehension (“What time
is the tournament?”).

2. Many of the other administrators of the server were inexperienced with organising such a
large event or simply couldn’t be bothered (even though I had quite a lot of schoolwork and
they were simply playing video games or interacting with members of the community).
The team was made up of me and 6 others, but I found that it was only me and two other people who
were consistently helping and knew what was going on, despite me even writing up a short guide with
step-by-step instructions for the other administrators who had not been as involved. Throughout the
entire process (from coming up with the idea, to working out the logistics, to recruiting players, to
hosting the tournament itself) I found that I was doing most of the work by myself which I felt was very
unfair - for example, I received messages from & allocated all 100 players (as well as dozens more
who did not see that sign-ups were closed, or ended up not participating) by myself. Allocating the
players was difficult, as I had to consider both the players’ skill levels and their preferred roles and try
to accommodate these as much as possible. I considered calling off the tournament (or threatening to
do so if the other admins did not contribute) multiple times, but after we had announced it and seeing
the strong enthusiasm of the community, I felt that I could not let them down. Therefore, I chose to
stick it out but this reason later became one of the deciding factors for me leaving the team a few
months later - I learned and felt that teamwork was essential in big tasks like managing a server of
over several thousand members, and this was unfortunately lacking within the team.
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Young Enterprise - [removed to avoid dox]

In my Young Enterprise group, I took on the role of co-Financial Director. Throughout the long
process of coming up with and selling our brand & product ([removed to avoid dox]), there were two
significant activities that I took part in:

The ‘Dragons’ Den’

This essentially involved sending a few of the team members to represent the company and pitch our
idea to the ‘dragons’. It required communication across our (rather large) 18-member team as to who
was going and what we wanted to communicate to the ‘dragons’ - this was made much easier
through our group’s use of Facebook Messenger, as it was rare for all of us to be free at the same
time. The actual ‘performance’ was nerve-wracking due to the setting - it was very professional and
formal, with all the dragons (who were actual professionals in the financial industry) watching us.
However, we had practised our pitch with each other and I had confidence in our business itself,
which made it easier to give a strong and confident pitch. We received good feedback, and they
particularly loved our focus on mental health!

The business plan

The next big endeavour was to write up the business plan. Although we were going to use most of
the content we had verbally given in our Dragons’ Den pitch, there were still various areas amd
details missing, such as how we were going to deliver the product and what our exact marketing and
sales strategy was. During our meetings, I offered to type up the business plan with it projected on
the screen so that everyone could contribute - however, people were not fully engaged in it and some
(including the Managing Director) were instead focused on thinking of a new product to sell. While I
partly agreed that we needed to sell products other than just beanies, the business plan was due
pretty much the day after our meeting, so finishing it was a very urgent matter. This made it difficult to
get the business plan done, and I ended up doing most of it myself as I did not want to interrupt
conversations (although our business advisor did a few times, in order to help me out) especially
when they were being led by the MD. The other co-Financial Director was also very busy with
personal matters and did not get a chance to check my figures on the profit & loss statements, where
I had made a small error which was highlighted in our feedback. Overall, it was a very stressful piece
of work that I wish I had been more assertive in getting help with.

[images removed to avoid dox]

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IB CAS day - Ufton Court

The entire IB cohort was involved in a project at Ufton Court to help out the Ufton Court Educational
Centre Trust. This project involved rebuilding and strengthening the structure of a typical Iron Age
roundhouse. We learned about the importance of Ufton Court’s charitable efforts in history education,
which definitely further motivated us to put all our efforts into this project. After being introduced to
one of the staff at UC, we learned a brand new, slightly odd skill: daubing the walls of the
roundhouse. With this, we would be able to take off the old, worn-down daub of the roundhouse,
re-create it (which required crushing, watering, mixing, and compacting the old daub), and then
re-apply it. This required many processes, so we realised we would need to plan and allocate specific
jobs if we were to do this efficiently.

After doing all of this, the two days finally came where we would put this plan into action. However,
there were some problems that we came across. Some people became physically exhausted and
started doing relatively less work than others, which caused some resentment (but we were all
careful to be considerate and not bring up conflict when teamwork was necessary in this project).
Other people really disliked their ‘jobs’ - those who had to take off the old daub were working in quite
dusty and cramped conditions, which was obviously very unpleasant. Others were not physically
strong enough to crush the old daub fast enough for it to be remade and re-applied; others did not
enjoy compacting the daub (effectively a lot of water, mud, and straw) with their hands which were
not very well-covered by some thin gloves (that soon ran out). Because of this, our allocations and
plans became a little mixed up - people switched roles, took more breaks, etc. Despite this, we
managed to make a lot of progress and seeing the tangible results of our efforts was definitely
rewarding.