Category: Growth

This year has been one of the most important years so far in my UWC journey, I feel that I have greatly developed and learned a lot more about myself through the different experiences and I have benefited from the many opportunities presented to me throughout the year. Now that the year is almost over, looking back I can see that I have a stronger understanding of the type of person that I am and what strengths and weaknesses I obtain.

Personally, one of my greatest highlights this year was traveling to Kenya and climbing Mt. Kenya. That trip in the middle of Summer 2019 was very challenging and it was something that I didn’t that I would be able to do. This trip was known to be physically demanding and back then I did not put much effort into maintaining my physical health as I didn’t have regular exercising habits. Still, I wanted to make a change so I took some initiative and challenged myself to participate fully in this trip, and although I struggled a lot, with the support of my best friends I was able to make it to the summit as well as complete the 74km cycle journey which was extremely gratifying in the end. This has led me to take deeper consideration in my physical and mental wellbeing and now I feel that I have been able to build up good habits so that I consistently go for walks, runs, and practice various different fitness workouts.

Academically, I feel that I have improved greatly as well. I have learned a new skill, instead of treating the classes as a chore and forcing myself to concentrate, I have learned to actually gain a genuine interest in the subjects I am learning which makes me much more engaged in class and makes studying for tests seem way less overwhelming (which used to be one of my greatest struggles). I feel like these skills are going to be extremely useful for me in the future as they impact my work ethic itself and I will be able to apply them in an infinite amount of situations as I grow up.

The Jakarta Street Kids GC I participated in this year was very insightful and a great learning experience overall. As I am passionate about our cause, I was very interested and involved in the activities that we were doing. I also gained some useful leadership, management, and collaborative skills as I decided to take the lead enterprise role where I planned out cash flow charts for the events we were hosting. Furthermore, the PPIS service I did where we hosted hour-long sessions filled with games and activities to encourage young children from a local school to practice speaking English was very fun. I learned many useful skills such as patience and self-management in this service, and I also have learned more about myself and what I enjoy doing. I enjoyed interacting with the children and reading books to them, and I would like to pursue similar activities to this in the future.

As I finish the IGCSE course and wrap up the various academic subjects I have chosen, I feel much more excited about the future and motivated to continue learning so that I can eventually choose a career path to focus on. As I venture on into IB, I believe these next two years are going to be extremely important and it will have a significant impact on what I want to do in the future, however, I shouldn’t be intimidated by that but instead, embrace this next chapter of my life and be ready for everything that it has to offer.

Grade 10 has been a great learning experience for me. I have learnt many useful skills this year, the goals I set for myself at the start of the year and the mistakes I made have helped me to grow and make progress as a person. 

One of the services I participated in, PPIS, was a great opportunity for me to develop my leadership and collaborative skills. In the service we would host sessions for younger children who aren’t that great at speaking English, each of us would take turns in groups managing what games we would play and what items we would need. I found it very fun and I would like to pursue services with similar opportunities in the future.

The exam period posed a very stressful time for me, but it also taught me some crucial lessons on how to manage stress. Some of the techniques I learned were breathing exercise and mindfulness. This allowed me to feel calm and focus on my exam paper to properly demonstrate my knowledge. I want to use these skills in the future as I feel they are very important.

I have taken away a lot from Grade 10, and I have learned many skills that I want to use in the future. I am grateful for having all of these great opportunities.

While in the transition process from iGCSE to IB, I have gained many opportunities to learn about which career path I want to follow for the future. The subjects that I choose in IB does have a large impact on how I will spend the rest of my two years in this school and what I hope to do after I graduate, therefore, it does feel like there is a lot of pressure.

To manage it I made sure not to constantly overthink and dread of which option I should take, and instead just choose the one which syllabus and course content personally interest me. I didn’t want to push myself and choose a challenging subject, because although it may be helpful later on and impress others around me, it would make my IB experience quite difficult and challenging.

Talking to other students who have done/are doing the IB, talking to my previous teachers who understand my strengths and weaknesses, talking to teachers who are teaching in IB, and talking to my parents has really helped me gain an insightful perspective on all of the different options I want to take. Many people tell me that my IB subjects should match each other and focus on a particular field, so I have taken that advice while also trying to try new subjects that could interest me.

In the end, I think I am in quite an important time of my life, but by taking advantage of the help and advice that I can receive from others with more experience than me, I was able to make this transition process as smooth as possible.

From the Interest Profiler website, I found that my top results were jobs related to business and arts, design, sports and entertainment and media, for example, film director or a business entrepreneur. These jobs are what I have always been interested in since I was young, and I am looking to attempt pursuing this field of work in the future. I think I have always been interested in these because of my natural talent/skill, personal goals, and what I generally really enjoy doing.

Some jobs that I have never considered were becoming an architect, a corporate seller, a software engineer, yet I found out that they are well-paying jobs that can actually be really intriguing.

I found becoming a mechanical engineer, or a physician to not really interest me, and this is mainly because I do not enjoy practicing maths and I am not really interested in physics topics.

Since I was born with so many privileges, I feel obliged to make the most of my life because I cannot let anyone down. Therefore I have to take the necessary steps to do so. This year I have tried to take many risks and become independent in order to prepare myself for the future. I signed up for the Kenya school trip this year, where we are going to go on a 10km hike at very high altitudes. I have been training for it so that I can enjoy those three weeks which I will be away from Singapore. I also tried playing new sports this year, I joined a school badminton class where we practiced badminton every Wednesday from 3-6pm. This was useful because it allowed me to practice useful skills in physical education which can also be used in other sports. I also tried playing golf this year, and I found out that I really enjoy the sport. My goal is to join the golf SEASAC team next year and to do that I have to practice a lot and consistently. While going through this year I also wanted to express my gratitude for all of the things I take for granted because sometimes things go by too fast and you don’t have time to appreciate anything, so I joined the Capturing East service, which is a service where our objective is to celebrate and show appreciation to the support staff in our school community. We wanted to build a closer connection between the students and the support staff, such as the librarians, chefs, security guards. So far, we have already set up many eye-catching posters which are about individual staff members, fun facts about them, so that students will learn more about the people that take care of them and treat them more like regular humans. I have been proud to be a part of this service because a goal I set myself last year was to take service seriously as it is a vital aspect to have when developing to an adult. I tried to achieve my goals by experimenting with various techniques for studying, such as studying for 45 minutes and taking a 20-minute break, or studying for a long period of time and then taking a long break, because I knew I need to develop good studying habits and practice time management in order to do well academically in this school.

People study in different ways, for example, they make flash cards, or some others may make a little song to memorise things.

But what is the purpose of studying? Does getting bad grades mean you don’t study? I believe that is not true. Some people may have a harder time understanding something. However, this does not mean that you are allowed to procrastinate and still get good grades. Most people expect that the more you study, the higher your grades, for example on this graph:

We can see it has a positive linear relationship, and this is true, however, if you do not balance your study and free time hours, and leave everything to the last night, then on the test you may do well however you will quickly forget that information you learned while as others who practised a little bit every night would have remembered this information much longer and it would be useful to them the following year.

Here are some of the best tips I can think of:

• Organise your time. Plan out your day, make sure you have at least one hour every day dedicated to just studying. This will prevent you staying up many hours on nights because you would be getting assignments due weeks ahead done already.
• Have a positive attitude. If you have no interest in the subject, then look forward to finishing the homework and then getting that feeling of having lots of free time.
• Concentrate! If you give one hour a day dedicated to studying, use that hour down to it’s second! Do not keep extending when you are going to start studying. If you start then the hour will finish up much quicker then you think. It’s good to have a specified hour where you have to study throughout it, I recommend if you get home at 4:00 then study from 4:30 – 5:30, or even better 4:00 to 5:00. If you get it over quickly, then you will have the full day to spend doing whatever you want.
• Have lots of sleep! You need to have the energy to put into work throughout the day. Most people say get 7-8 hours of sleep, but it’s okay if you need more. I get tired when I get home from school when I get 7 hours of sleep, which is why I try to get 8-9 hours.

In the end, it all comes down to how you approach what you are about to do, whether it be studying or something else. It doesn’t matter if you are good or bad, what matter is your attitude, how focused and determined you are, but if you are passionate on getting better and are ready to put the work into it, then these tips will really help you.

My 10 Strengths:

• Empathetic
• Humble
• Peaceful
• Funny
• Understanding
• Hard Working
• Goal Setter
• Good time manager
• Organisation
• Staying focused

10 Strengths of my friend

• Shawn is good at staying focused
• Organising
• Staying on task
• Humble
• Hardworking
• Time management
• Empathic
• A good goal setter
• Funny
• Creative

What other people think my strengths are: