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Part 2:
Author: makel73208@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg
List of CAS Posts with Learning Outcomes
Grade 11 Season 1 CAS Selections (19/9/17) – LO1, LO2, LO4, LO5, LO6, LO7
Liberty Wave Open Water (5/10/17) – LO2, LO3
DJ Club Half Term Reflection (16/10/17) – LO2, LO4
Christian Outreach for the Handicapped First Visit (16/10/17) – LO5, LO6
Swimming End of 2017 Reflection (27/12/17) – LO2, LO4
Christian Outreach Winter Break Reflection (27/12/17) – LO6, LO7
End of DJ Club (15/2/18) – LO2, LO4
Christian Outreach CNY Reflection (6/3/18) – LO1, LO2, LO4, LO5, LO6, LO7
Swimming Pre SNAGS Reflection (16/3/18) – LO2, LO4
Swimming Post SNAGS Reflection (27/3/18) – LO1, LO2, LO4
End of Christian Outreach Reflection (3/5/18) – LO1, LO2, LO6, LO7
Project Week Planning Reflection (7/5/18) – LO3, LO5
Post Project Week Reflection (28/8/18) – LO2, LO4, LO5
Grade 12 CAS Selections (1/9/18) – LO4
Swimming October Half Term Reflection (1/11/18) – LO1, LO2, LO4, LO5
FINA World Cup Reflection (29/11/18) – LO2
Swimming Final Reflection (12/1/19) – LO4, LO5
Swimming Final Reflection January 2019
With CAS interviews approaching and the 18 months of CAS complete, I want to write one last reflection for swimming: the one activity that I have been doing through the entire process. SEASAC selections came out just this week, and this year I was selected to represent East (thank god). This year the boys selection was even more competitive than last year, with more boys being in the mix as possible selections, but I was still quite confident that I would be chosen. But then again I was even more confident last year and was not chosen so I did not make any assumptions this year before the actual team was released.
We are changing my program again from what it was changed to last year. After SNAGS last March, I felt like my training went back to the kind of swimming I was doing in the fall of 2017, when I reflected on wanting to quit swimming due to the long and mentally tiring training sessions. All of last fall and the winter break I was always swimming in training and thinking to myself: “Why am I swimming this set? Why am I swimming such long distance.” I did not bring it up to my coach mainly because I did not want to put in the effort of having to think through an argument and a solution ie. a new program for myself. At that point I was also ready to quit swimming and honestly did not care whether I improved or not. However, I had competitions last fall that had been paid for that I did not want to waste and I always had the possibility of SEASAC to keep me swimming. (LO4)
Over the winter break I met with a coach outside of school and spoke about my training. We discussed what I was doing, how it could be changed and how the other coach could help. Then I went to talk to my coach in order to try and come up with a new program in order to try and make this last stretch of high school swimming something worthwhile and to see me improve. We had to compromise in order to get most of what I wanted, but to still allow my coach to have some say in what was best for me at this stage. Overall the new program looks promising and I think with it I will be able to make some huge leaps before SEASAC and swim my lifetime best times there. (LO5) Then afterwards we will keep it going for a couple weeks before Singapore National Age Groups.
After these two competitions in March I will likely not swim as much anymore. Swimming has been a big part of my life since grade 8, and for the past two years has been hugely mentally draining. Although I do not want to completely let go of swimming, I will lessen the amount in order to let me take a mental break and focus on other things such as exams and preparing for university. It is unlikely I will swim at university and therefore do not feel the need to keep going for that reason after this final stretch.
Overall swimming has been a great experience and has given me valuable lessons, but is soon time to move on to other things. And until then I will focus everything (food, sleep, free time) towards swimming fast this March. And who knows? Maybe I’ll swim so fast I’ll have to continue to swim at university and later the olympics.
FINA World Cup Reflection
2 weeks ago I swam at the last stop of the FINA world cup swim series in Singapore. I was swimming alongside swimmers ranging from other Singaporean club swimmers to olympic gold medalists. Although it was a big competition, we did not rest for it since we did not have a chance of making finals, and therefore this competition was not a big focus in the year. Going into my swims I was not expecting anything super fast, but actually swam quite well. The pool was short course, and I beat all of my long course best times, although the converted times were between 0.5 – 1 second off. In addition, my times were very similar to three weeks ago when I visited my old school in Hanoi, where I swam short course as well. (LO2)
It was funny and eyeopening to swim at two competitions so close together in time that are so far apart in level. At my old school I got 5 gold medals from 5 swims, beating 2nd place by 5 seconds in the 100s, and 1 second in the 50s. At my old school everyone was amazed at how fast I was swimming and some parents even talked to my parents about how this must help for getting into university and asking how good it is at an international level.
However in normal competitions I am in the middle or the slower end, and at an international level my times are not fast at all. At the world cup, there were around 80 male swimmers in each event, and I placed around 50th-60th. Considering the level of the competition, this is quite an achievement, but compared to 5 golds three weeks prior, is not the same at all. (LO2)
It was cool swimming only a few heats before swimmers such as Michael Andrew and Blake Pieroni, big household names. I saw how they approached a competition in marshalling, which is normally not shown on television from major competitions. I saw their warm up routines and how their approach did not differ much from my own.
My next focus is Feeding Frenzy next week, for which we are resting a bit, and which is a very fun meet even if my races do not go as well as they could. I am aiming for some fast swimming, but similarly to some of my other competitions, will not be disappointed if my times are a bit off. After this the SEASAC team will hopefully be released before the winter break and depending on whether I make it or not, I will think about how I will continue training, and how my commitment to the sport will change/remain the same.
EE Final Reflection
In the end my biggest challenge was definitely conducting my experiment. I thought I could complete it in one week, but in reality it took closer to three, due to having to rebuild the experimental setup several times. I was collecting data quite last minute before the summer and would have definitely preferred a less stressful last couple of weeks.
Writing the essay itself, I allocated two weeks before the initial submission just to sit down each day and spend a solid block of time finishing writing up the essay. I am definitely proud of my essay and the research I have done, since the articles I have read have broadened my knowledge of swimming beyond just the topic of my essay. The article by Barbosa and co. has been my most insightful source by providing large amounts of in depth information to serve as a starting point for my research, and multiple other useful sources through its citations.
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Swimming October Half Term Reflection
Since the beginning of the year, I have had several competitions. The first being Club Championships that only my team participated in and where everyone swam every single Olympic event (minus the 1500). I took a relaxed approach towards this competition, as I knew it was in the middle of hard training and having so many events in a few days was not going to allow me to recover enough. I think this was a very successful approach since although I tried my best in the swims, I wasn’t expecting super fast times, and therefore was not disappointed after swimming mediocre times. In fact, I was a little bit surprised that I swam as well as I did.
The second and most recent competition since August was the Merlion Sprint Festival. This was a competition where multiple international schools participated in, where I only swam four events: my best four. We did not rest for this competition either, and the swims where quite close together, but the opportunity for cool down after races and the better pool meant I had higher expectations from this than the previous competitions. I was still not expecting best times, and was pleasantly surprised with my butterfly events. 100 butterfly I managed to swim a 1 second best time, and on the 50 I was just 0.7 seconds off of my best. My freestyle was not as good, but since for this competition I was not expecting super fast times, it did not bring me down.
In my reflection in August I said that I do not enjoy swimming anymore. I would like to clarify that in this reflection. I love competing, swimming fast and my team. What I do not enjoy is training. The endless swimming up and down the pool, with others going faster than me, me sometimes not making the sendoffs and struggling to sometimes even move my sore muscles is what I do not enjoy. Some sessions are fun, when the type of swimming is more geared towards what I compete in: sprint and short distance events. But when the training is more for long distance, I hate it.
Going to the gym as part of my program is one of the things that I enjoy the most. I feel I can push myself more in the gym than the pool which might just be due to my fixed mindset of not enjoying swimming, and actually loving going to the gym. (LO1) I often think that I would like to gym more, since full body three times a week is honestly not going to allow me to see huge improvements. But as I have said before, I will continue with the program until March at least. (LO2) After March I am planning on dropping two swimming sessions, and adding three more gym sessions. This way I can get everything out of the gym that I want, while still maintaining an involvement in swimming. And who knows? Maybe my sprints will get even faster than they are now simply through the increased gym training.
My team has helped me a lot in motivating me to come to training everyday. They do not explicitly do anything since I do not really let anyone know that I don’t want to be there or that I don’t feel like coming that day. But just their positive attitudes and friendly banter is what helps me enjoy training and get over slow swims I may have done in training that day. This is one of the main reasons I did not quit swimming last December, and why I have not after, and why I will not until the end of IB. Swimming really is a team sport. (LO4) (LO5)
Grade 12 CAS Selections
Since I met all of the minimum CAS requirements in grade 11, I do not feel the need to do an activity for all 3 of the components again this year. Instead, for grade 12 I will only focus on swimming as my activity. This will allow me to spend all of my time focusing on it outside of school and hopefully I will see even bigger results than I did last year.
Being honest, I do not feel I enjoy swimming as much as I did in the first 3 years of doing it. Last year and now I am becoming more annoyed with it due to not progressing much even though I put a lot of effort in training, and seeing other swimmers who do not put in as much effort improve a lot past me. However, although I have little motivation, I know swimming is a sport where you may be stuck in the same place for several years before seeing even a minor improvement. Therefore I am finding little things to motivate me and keep me training properly. For example, in October I am going to visit my old school in Vietnam and compete at a swimming competition there. I want to be in good shape since I was one of the fastest swimmers when I left and don’t want to swim really slow in 2 months.
I have also decided that no matter how I feel I will continue swimming until March, (LO4) when I will compete in the Singapore National Age Group competition, which is the biggest competition of the year. Unless I swim really fast and feel happy, I will not continue swimming at the same competitive level as now. If I feel I have succeeded with the times I have swum, I will likely swim until June where I have several large competitions as well, but will most likely not swim at university.
EE Interim Reflection
Having submitted an initial draft of my essay, several points have come up in the process of writing it. Conducting my experiment did not go as smoothly as planned, since the set up was not perfect and initially did not seem to work how I had intended it to. Yet after doing more planning and testing, I managed to refine the set up and experiment to collect the data I wanted. Researching for information to support the experimental findings was at times hard because not all seemingly relevant sources were in fact recent or accurate.
My supervisor and I have discussed the relevance of my sources and how this evaluation could be mentioned in the essay itself. In addition, we have decided to change the structure in order to make the essay easier to read. We have also evaluated my refined research question from the last reflection and the changes made to the experiments.
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Post Project Week Reflection
Project week was an interesting experience. Not everything went according to plan. Four of us, including me, got food poisoning and threw up three days into the trip. Luckily all of us were feeling better after two full days of rest and were still able to enjoy the last two days of the trip. It did, however, unfortunately mean that Alexander and I missed our third surfing lesson and our fourth full day of service, while the others only missed the day of service. We let our organisation know, and they were very understanding, as Alexander had actually thrown up while doing the third day of service.
Our service was however very enjoyable for the three days that we completed it for. We got a different group of kids each day, ranging from 4th to 6th graders. We had initially been told that the children would be the same each day, but nevertheless we were able to make it work. Some activities, such as introductory activities, worked well with all groups, but we found that what worked with the younger children did not always work with the older kids since they thought they were too ‘cool’ for them. We improvised and came up with more advanced activities to keep the older children interested. Language was also a barrier we came across when working with the children since their English was quite limited, but we were able to communicate with them through simple short sentences, gestures and facial expressions. (LO2)
With surfing, all of us were challenged since none of us had surfed before. The organisation SSSPhuket was very welcoming and their provided instructors were capable of teaching us all to surf. In the end, all of us were able to catch and surf about every 3rd wave. One difficulty occured when we thought we had payed for 3 hours on the last day while in reality had only paid for 1 1/2. We were only told about this 2 hours into our lesson, and therefore continued and had to pay for the extra time. (LO4) This was miscommunication between the manager who I organised the lessons with, and the instructors. Nevertheless, they were very apologetic and we left with no hard feelings.
The last challenge that we encountered on the trip was on the first day right after we landed. At the airport we bought prepaid sim cards, but were then left with the task of buying a ride to our hotel. We knew from prior research that their were transport providers in the airport. (LO3) We went to several, and bought a trip with what we thought was a minibus for 5 people. We paid and got a ticket we had to show to the drivers outside. However, they brought us to a jeep, because that was what we had ‘paid for’. We then went back inside and had to pay extra (less thanSGD10) for the minibus. This time it worked and we made it to our hotel after an almost 2 hour bus ride.
Although I have mainly talked about challenges, the whole experience was very enjoyable. We helped teach underprivileged children, learned how to surf (at least a bit), and had a chance to explore a beautiful city. I have mainly referenced these challenges since we had done extensive planning before hand, to avoid any obstacles on the actual trip, but this just goes to show that not everything goes according to plan. Sometimes you need to improvise and make the best of your situation. When we were all sick, we had the chance of doing some school work and resting at the hotel, when we hadn’t paid enough for surfing we did not start arguing but enjoyed the extra time and paid afterwards, and when we got ‘scammed’ by the airport drivers, we remained calm and figured things out. This was a week I will always remember and one that strengthened friendships.