While the school often says that you don’t necessarily need to be with your friends in order to complete Project Week, there is something to be said about building better bonds with the friends you already have. Luckily, I did not really experience the struggle many people had of not fitting in to any one particular group, and I ended up being with my two close friends and two other girls I got along quite well with. I knew that all the girls I was with were each organized and prepared to take initiative during the planning and trip itself, which was a very key point in being able to work together. We quickly decided to have a Skype call to discuss location, focus, and our general ideas for what we wanted as a goal. Using some older resources from previous years, we went through a list of locations and services. We decided that we would rather do service along with something else, if not all three aspects of CAS, rather than doing activity and creativity alone. Some of the locations would work because we also wanted to prioritize safety, and the areas or cities were in unsafe times or we wouldn’t be familiar with the area at all. We also wanted to work more with children or with education-based focuses as opposed to working in environmental or animal focused services. I really wanted to focus on working with education because my GC is an education focused group that partners with a school in India. While I was unable to go to the school for a variety of reasons, it didn’t mean I would forfeit my desire to focus on education. Therefore, I was quite excited to work with a group that was also passionate about education. We originally decided on a school north of Phuket to work with, that was located in a national park, but when new resources were sent out, we discovered that the list of approved locations and services were greatly reduced. Continuing on the same line, we chose School For Life in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It was located in a safe and familiar city, our service would be a school which fulfilled our focus, and UWC had pre-existing partnerships with various activity providers in the area. This meant that we had a good foundation to begin mapping out our ideal trip and see how we could best fulfill the different aspects of CAS in our own personal manner. We didn’t encounter many struggles into finding a location or focus because we all found ourselves in agreements about the various passions and interests that would help shape how we planned our trip, and this gave us a clear sense of direction that lasted the entire process.