FINAL REFLECTION.

CREATIVITY.
Over the course of the last two years, my greatest focus of CAS has been through Creativity. This is because many of the extra-curricular activities that I have participated in have been under the umbrella of Creativity. My leadership duties in SGA (G11), CO-MUN (G11&12) and Prom Committee (G11) and my participation in the plays the Crucible (G11) and the Curious Savage (G12), both helping out with stage craft elements, yearbook (G11), the Gateway quiz (G12) and ISTA TAPS (G12) have been what I have done in the last two years, in terms of Creativity.

Because of this large array of Creativity options that I have taken upon me over the course of the last two years, I have seen that I have various skills and interests that both generated my choice in participation in these activities, as well as made me want to do them again. Especially in the case of the plays that I helped with; The Crucible, the first one, because we were doing costume, I found that I love sewing and that I am quite good at it, which I did not think I would be before I tried it. From the skills that I learnt here, I was able to apply them elsewhere, and have become quite the tailor when it comes to altering my own clothes. The other play, the Curious Savage, I asked to help with the make-up because it is one part of stage craft that I find very interesting and wanted to learn more about. From this experience, I learnt how to put make-up on actors properly, especially in the case of aging characters, which is an interesting and sometimes difficult technique. I have done yearbook after MUN finishes in March since 9th grade, and so since then I have used Photoshop, and I have a competency in it, and every year these skills expand, no more so than G11, when I learnt how to do a variety of different effects which I did not know how to do before.
SGA and CO-MUN thoroughly showed my initiative and planning, because I held such key roles in both these events. For SGA I was secretary, and because of complicated issues with our President, I was second in command, and felt this role greatly because I felt like we had a lot of pressure on us to be one of the best SGA OSC has seen in years, which motivated me to work even harder at this role. CO-MUN is one of the largest student run MUN conferences in the world, and as a result of this heavy reliance on student planning to pull off this colossal event, especially in a leadership role such as the one that I had in G12, requires great amount of planning and initiative. This activity in itself is the greatest source of learning of global issues in school than any other activity, my participation in the Gateway Quiz further built on my interest in global affairs, and was an excellent exposure to the competition, as well as increasing knowledge. Prom, in addition to this, showed our initiative and motivation to plan it, as it was not an event that was something that we wanted to do, and had not been done in OSC, and so getting the numbers up took some work, because of issues such as the cost of the tickets. However, we pursued, and the event turned out to be a huge success. All of these things allowed me to work collaboratively with others, because if i wasn't able to do this, and other people were not able to do this, none of the events would have been pulled off with the success that they were.


ACTION
Because I am a much more creative person than I am active, my action is much less than creativity. My major action for the two years was SAISA Football, which I did in G11. I was going to continue it in G12, but found that I had too much on my plate at that time of the year. Football was not something that I was very good at, or sport in general, but in G10, I tried it, and found that I really enjoyed it and even though I did not make the team the year before, I tried very hard and was able to make the team G11. This activity greatly developed new skills, allowed me to work collaboratively and as a team, allowed me to undertake new challenges, as well as increased my awareness of my own strengths as a person, by doing something that was so out of my comfort zone.

SERVICE
My service component was dominated by the Service Hope for Kids, which aims at raising money for the children at the Maharagama Cancer Hospital. We met every week, at least for a meeting, and if not we went to the hospital to play with the children. In October, we organized a charity concert, which was named Versus Cancer, where acts from many different schools performed and people came and bought tickets, supporting this cause. We had to consider the ethical implications of this act, because people weren't really getting the point of the concert other than the fact that it was a performance. So we decided to include videos about the disease, especially in children, as well as selling t-shirts that were supporting the cause. Again, we had to work collaboratively to make this a success.
For CO-MUN, we chose to have a rations drive to add a new dimension to the very intellect-based Model United Nations, and managed to collect a great amount rations for the people in the North and East of Sri Lanka, which was heavily affected by flooding. This was a new initiative that we thought of ourselves, and I think that this worked very well, and hopefully the collection made a difference.