Diego Santos

CAS Reflection Essay

During this last two years in CAS I have experienced a variety of changes in my
personal life thanks to the impact the activities I over the period of this course.
When I started I had a clear idea of the attitudes and skills I need to acquire in order
to make a good progress in these activities, now that the course is over I find that I
have learnt many of these attitudes and skills but there is still much more to learn
and this process wont be over soon.
Amongst the attitudes I managed to learn there is patience and being a good
enquirer, both of these skills were very hard to obtain because I had the wrong
perspective that I was already exceeding in this areas. Through the process of being
a planning and being a part of my CAS activities I realize that areas things such as
leadership, teamwork, and time management, all which I thought I was very good
at, turned out to be some of the areas in which I had to improve the most. For
instance, before when I thought of leadership I just assumed that a good leader is
the one who delegates jobs and comes back to judge and make comments on the
finished product, now I know that a good leader is he who delegates but helps with
the jobs all along the process making sure that he is facilitating the work rather
than actually doing in.
Through these two years I managed to do a wide range of activities which I have
enjoyed all but in different aspects than others. However, from all the activities I
have made I enjoyed the most my role as the new National Junior Representative
(NJR) of the Junior Branch Ecuador. Being the new NJR has made me grown more
than many of the activities that I have done even though I was only elected a six
months ago. I have managed to get a global and local perspective of the current
issues we are experiencing now and ,most importantly, I have learned ways in
which with the help of the JB we can tackle this growing issues. In a more personal
level, thanks to this role I have learnt a lot about what qualities I can teach JBrs and
what qualities I can learn from them every day.
Overall, having finished the course I realize that getting into activities or planning
them was only difficult at the beginning, mostly because I felt I lack experience or
that I didnt know where to look for activities, but now I know there is room to create
activities all around and more so thanks to the society I live in which need much
help. I am very pleased with the development I have done throughout this course
because without it I wouldnt have been able to grow as a person as much as I have,
especially with the IB diploma being so demanding as it is. I will continue to
participate actively in the activities I have done over these two years and I know I
will keep developing thanks to them.