The Psychology Club, a club made for psychology enthusiasts and thinkers. Being the pioneers to opening a psychology club gave us an overwhelming response on our enrolment form. I think this was debatably the most exciting and most tiring one out of all that I had done for CAS. This was my first project (it’s still on-going and will be handed over to our junior club members after we graduate, but just for CAS purposes it’s completed!) and I am proudly a co-president and co-founder of this club along with 2 of my friends who are interested in the same field of study and bringing like-minded people together in a safe and comfortable environment such as a club. The 3 of us came together to form this precious club which took a lot of brainstorming, planning, execution, and permissions to form. Even after the club was formed with loads of members in it and our helpful, supportive supervisors with us (who guided us a lot which we truly and deeply appreciate), it still didn’t exactly come alive with all the excitement and feeling of accomplishment until our first ever psychology club session! Looking back at it we worked at a highly impressive speed to finalise everything and conduct the first session within 2 weeks of the club’s approval to be established. In these 2 weeks we did a lot, from sending out enrolment forms, finalising and shortlisting members, sending out emails of greetings, recruitment/membership confirmation, creating PPTs, sending details of upcoming sessions and work pattern, making Google Classroom for announcements and sharing of before/after session resources, sending out calendar invites for sessions (since all of them were kept online due to the pandemic), making hangout groups for easier and quicker communication, creating and maintaining a main sheet where attendance, brainstormed ideas and a lot more was official kept, etc. And that, that was just the beginning, both, of our work and excitement level! As part of our service component we made and maintained an instagram account on which posted about mental health and spread awareness in order to get mental health the same respected recognition as physical and spiritual health. Through this we also strived to reduce the stigma surrounding mental health by normalising the normal and talking about what’s relevant and imperative to be shedded light on. The Psychology Club also organised an event on the mental health awareness day.

LO 1 – I was aware of some of my strengths before we started working for the club, but satisfyingly I discovered many more of my talents, skills, abilities and strengths which I also kept on developing. Being in a team requires equal and evenly distributed efforts from each member and what that being said, we divided our operations for the club into 3 main parts: Logistics and Communication, Session Planning and Conducting, and Social Media Management. The 3 of us evaluated our strengths and weaknesses and luckily all of us could fit these 3 main departments perfectly with our own set of skills. Initially I was the head of Session planning and Conducting. After a few weeks, me and 1 of the other 2 co-presidents decided to swap our roles to help us develop in another set of skills, and I swapped with the one who initially handled Logistics and Communication. We soon realised that we would need to co-work for logistics and communication, and session planning and conducting; therefore, we decided to undertake those 2 departments together in collaboration. We realised our and each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and helped each other develop on what we lack and work with what’s best in us. I discovered that logistics and communication (organising, reminders, maintaining records, communications, collaborating, and supervising deadlines and work done, etc) was one of my biggest strengths throughout the course of the club. This set of skills definitely helped me be diligent towards the club and fulfil my duties/responsibilities.

LO 2 – Juggling between bi-weekly club sessions (alternate Saturday to fit everyones’ schedule) and almost weekly instagram posts for our Service component while planning for future sessions and once holding an event for the Mental Health Awareness Day, was all so much being done by us at the time along with it being our first few months in DP year 1. All of this hard work did really pay off with our CAS being led nicely, service component (Social Media) going smoothly with satisfactory response, and the feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction motivating us to push forward with more energy. Although this was the first time I had established and run a club, it felt awesome to be able to do and manage everything even while we were online and still in the process of getting used to our new normal. I developed managerial, organisation, communication and many more skills through this project; I got a chance to develop and enhance my skills further through this opportunity. Honestly, being the co-founder and co-president of this club made me very proud of myself, and I could see myself behaving much more responsibly than I already was, overall the experience was just awesome and thrilling, exhausting too! To help with our Social Media (SM) account named Psyched About It! (instagram handle: @psyched_about_it) we gathered a team of 4 volunteers from our grade and one grade lower who helped us with poster creations mainly (now the format and pattern has changed a bit) which were then posted on our account by the co-president responsible for SM.

LO 3 – To make it clear and concise, we had 2 main components which completed our club’s operations, one being the club and regular sessions itself and second being the instagram account we named Psyched About It! We put a lot of thought into choosing the perfect name itself, all 3 of us brought in various ideas however in the end we went along with the catchy name I suggested. The thoughts behind ‘psyched about it’ were pretty simple yet creative. “I’m psyched about it!” is actually an informal slang phrase/sentence which loosely translates to an individual being excited or hyped up about something that’s going to happen. This I thought would suit our club perfectly as all of us and the members were definitely psyched about the psychology club! And then after we finalised this as our name on SM we had to make our own logo, which yet again was an enthralling experience as I was given the responsibility to create our logo (picture added as evidence). Apart from the 2 main components which made up our club, we had initiated a senior-school level event for the Mental Health Awareness Day to spread awareness and break the taboo around mental health and freedom of vulnerable expression without judgement, and seeking help without fear, and for that we worked tirelessly. Getting permissions, approvals, attaining help from our supervisors and well-being counsellors to help conduct this event along with creating PPTs with the help of our 2 SM volunteers (our grademates), and a lot more.

LO 4 – Being a president and running a club with several and various responsibilities is overwhelming, it demands a lot of commitment, dedication and efficiency. It wasn’t as difficult at first for me even though it was the first time I became a club’s president, maybe it was the excitement and energy of the initiation of our club which made it seem not so difficult at first. As we progressed along, especially during the time of our MHAD event it all became very difficult to manage along with other things. We had to push through and meet deadlines desperately in order to not lag behind. As it is, having a club means constant dedication towards its operations and development, meaning I had to be constantly committed to my duties and responsibilities for the smooth running of this club. Commitment and persistence wasn’t an issue for me as I loved running this club with my friends and amazing club members being a part of it, it honestly was a motivation, but managing everything at the same time was a really big challenge that had to be tackled anyhow. And I believe I did tackle it to a great extent.

LO 5 – All of us are highly motivated and diligent workers which made us the perfect team to be working together. We have interest in psychology and bringing link-minded people together which lead us to easily collaborate with each other as co-presidents making informed decisions for our club. Luckily we fitted our assigned main departments out of 3 to supervise their operations and management. I had voluntarily become the person who would keep track of our upcoming deadlines and keep giving us reminders for tasks to be completed. I struggled with getting one of the other 2 co-presidents to make regular SM posts which frustrated me very much in the beginning but later on I learnt not to get too worked up over it. Apart from that we worked amazingly as a team when making decisions, getting tasks done, conducting sessions, communicating, and in a lot more areas. All of us showed leadership skills we had acquired through years of being an IB student, and also our school aims to structure us into world leaders.

LO 6 – We engaged and contributed towards the Sustainable Development Goal number 3: Good Health and Well-Being (as we tackled issues relating to mental health through our instagram posts), and Goal number 4: Quality Education (as we spread knowledge and awareness through regular instagram posts). Mental Health is a global issue which is now receiving – through unending efforts of professionals, activists, etc – global significance as it should. To extend our support for this cause we organized and held the event of MHAD which aimed to maximize the spreading of knowledge and awareness about mental health and its importance, to break the taboo around it and bring in the freedom of being ourselves, to make people learn how to help themselves through cathartic and therapeutic means as well as seeking a mental health professional if need be without any hesitation. All in all it was through a fun event we catered to all our objectives effectively.

LO 7 – For our social media page, we made an anonymous form which was to provide people (anyone who follows our SM page, even people out of psych club) a safer space to talk to someone about their issues and get some help; it had MCQ option for choosing between giving feedback/criticism for our SM page, suggestion or recommendation, questions related to psychology as a whole, and concern regarding mental health. And then there was space to put in their response. We made sure to make it anonymous by disabling email ID collection as well as asking them to write a pseudonym such as “WonderingAtLength”, “JustBeingEvil”, etc. We even got a response once from someone concerning their mental health. We decided to take their concerns to professional psychologists since we weren’t qualified to provide them with a proper and reliable solution/response. After our supervisors got back to us, we posted the response/solution on our story maintaining the person’s anonymity and tried helping them as well as any others who needed to hear it. On a different note, especially for a club which is made for a very information-sensitive and subjective subject such as psychology demands a high level of responsibility undertaking. Being well aware of this, 3 of us co-presidents made sure of being very careful with what we put out to our members and to our participants in case of an event like we had MHAD. Manier times we would come up with very interesting topics (such as Psychology behind Religion) but ended up rejecting them from taking up a session on them as they were highly controversial and subjective which could hurt someone’s feelings, challenge their opinions, make them feel inferior or targetted, etc (these would only backfire at us as our club is a safe space where everyone should have equal rights to opinions). We were well versed with the negative repercussions of choosing a topic which would make us seem insensitive towards a group or individual, and could be potentially extremely controversial or hurtful to some’s sentiments thus we found it best to avoid any such issues.

To sum it up, I enjoyed running and taking up the responsibility of being a president of The Psychology Club and I am certainly very proud of how far we have come. I am hopeful and determined to take us further ahead with all of our goals attained by us in the process. I hope we can continue providing a safe space for our club members to freely talk about their opinions. We’ll continue being ethical, have integrity and be respectful towards all social groups at large and our members. Lastly, I demonstrated and developed all the Learner Profile attributes: Thinkers, Reflective, Open-Minded, Knowledgeable, Inquirers, Caring, Courageous, Balanced, Principled, Communicators.

Evidences: