Reflection

During my time at NCS, I met many new people and made many new friends. Throughout this experience of four weeks we did many enjoyable things. For the first week I went on a residential trip where I was able to take part in many amazing new adventurous activities such as rock-climbing, abseiling, raft-building and orienteering. For the second week we were required to go and stay at a university campus. We went to Greenwich University and all stayed in flats like typical university students. Here I had to cook for myself and improve and learn life skills. For the last 2 weeks I was required to do a volunteering project. During these 2 weeks I spoke on topics such as littering and worked with Wide Horizons. This required a lot of initiation and planning.

This CAS experience allowed me to and helped me identify my own strengths as well as develop areas for growth. I was able to demonstrate my public speaking and communication skills as well as discover how much Improvement I required at public speaking. I showed perseverance in this experience since I wasn’t always sure how and what to say to those around me; this required me to think carefully about what to say and was quite a challenging process which allowed me to develop new skills. The environment is an important issue worldwide and littering is a problem everywhere, I was able to demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance. This experience helped me to recognise and consider ethical decisions since I was required to take some important decisions for our group project.

Young Enterprise

Young Enterprise is a charity for young people, BGS offers the 'Company Programme', where a team creates a company and then has to compete against other companies all over the UK. I was very interested in being part of Young Enterprise, as I have always been intrigued by business and economics. I hoped to gain a lot of knowledge about starting a company and what goes on 'behind the scenes' when producing goods, and also the different stages of production that occur. I would also like to know more about the business side of the world and how commerce works, and ultimately, what makes companies successful. I would be challenged to do something that I have not done before; I would also learn about my strengths and weaknesses. Lastly, I hoped that whatever product we choose to produce would be accessible and useful for everyone, or that it would raise awareness for a minority group, so that it will impact lives positively, all over the World.

Reflection

Being part of the Young Enterprise team was such an incredible experience! It was one of the first things that I joined as a Sixth Former in Year 12 and became a way for me to build stronger friendships with not only the internal students but also external students that were new to our school. My main goal was to learn more about the stages in creating a business and the work that happens to make a business successful. Prior to joining the team, I did not realise just how much time and how many people are needed to help run a business to ensure that it is successful. We were constantly in contact with people from around the World to find out about how they maintain their business, but also for manufacturing, product ideas that we had to learn more about the costs; it was interesting to compare how different countries had different materials that were worth and viewed differently.

We would meet every Monday during lunch to discuss the tasks that needed to be done and the upcoming events. This was usually the only time during the week where we would all be together as a team so it was very important to show up. It was easy for me to be committed because I enjoyed being part of the team, however, it was difficult sometimes if people were absent or missing meaning that we could not do as much work as we wanted to. However, we overcame this by using various group chats to talk to each other quickly and delegate the tasks. It was interesting to work with a variety of people who specialised in different areas, I learnt a lot about working with others. This is important because in the future, I will come across many different types of people who specialise in many different things; there is a lot that you can learn from one individual person which I find fascinating! I was very lucky to be part of such a great team where we all supported each other and helped out even if it wasn't our area of work that we had to do.