Jasper Nielsen

02/20/2024

6 Core Competencies Reflection

Personal Awareness & Responsibility:

Strengths:
I can set goals, regulate my emotions, and persevere in difficult situations.
Being in Grade 12 and in the process of applying to universities and scholarships, as well as trying to
figure out what I want to do after school can bring a great deal of stress, which it has. Some of the
strategies I've been using to persevere in many stressful and overwhelming situations have been to set
goals, list things out, and practice breathing or recognize when I need to move on or take a break. A recent
example of regulating emotions and perseverance was during the weekend when my dad, brother, and I
went to Castle Fun Park for an afternoon. We had a long and fun day and decided to finish the day with
Go-Karting however, the line was much longer than at the beginning of the day and we waited for just
over an hour to go. When we finally got to go my Go-Kart ran out of gas about halfway through the race.
I just had to sit there as everyone else kept having fun around me. Still, I just thought positively about the
situation, “If I didn’t take this go-kart then another, younger kid would have their experience ruined” and
rolled with the waves, not getting upset and making the best of the situation.

I can express my needs and seek help when needed.

As someone who can struggle to meet deadlines and keep up with workflow and new information coming
in, expressing/explaining my needs to those who can help is key to success in my work ethic. Long
assignments or repetition-heavy workloads are things that I must heavily self-advocate for, as they can be
the most challenging due to the size and initial fear. Learning about asking for help and expressing my
needs was part of realizing that I am not alone and that it is not weak or doesn’t make me dumb if I ask
for help on a project. In English 12 and BCFP12 this year, asking for feedback and help on almost every
assignment I have done so far. This has led to success and improvement in both the general subjects of
Social Studies and English, which have been two big classes I’ve struggled with throughout school.
Learning how to self-advocate has gone from a weakness to a strength for me and I believe that it is a
skill everyone should learn as it can be applied in both school and work.

Weakness:
I am learning to take care of myself.
Learning to take care of myself continues to be a struggle in my life because as my old Careers teacher,
Ms. Lapierre liked to put it, “You like to put on other people’s oxygen masks before your own”. In the
context of a plane losing oxygen would end up with me eventually not being able to help anymore, if I
don’t focus on making sure that I am in the proper mindset and health to help others then I will eventually
burn out and not be able to help anyone. I’ve been in that situation many times before and in most cases I
have to either cancel a lot of commitments or tough it out for the ones I can’t change, which usually leads
to me struggling even more or getting sick. I’ve been working on this as I slowly lean on independence
more and more, leading to the new struggle of figuring out a healthy and productive way to take care of
myself without feeling like a bad or lazy person.

Social Responsibility:
Strengths:
I am aware of my community and environment and work independently and collaboratively for the
benefit of others.
I am someone who loves to get involved with the community in any way I can, whether that be helping
out at my church with the events they run or joining the REC leadership course to help build school spirit
and community. I believe that this love of community began back in grade 9 when I was very much into
Virtual Reality and playing social games during the pandemic, where I managed to build community by
joining social events and creating a group of friends. This blossomed into picking up trash on my walks
home to try to make the sidewalks cleaner and joining Ultimate Frisbee, slowly building the community
out from a small group of people interested to a full multi-team sport at our school! Working in rec has
also helped me a lot with working collaboratively as I got to spend time working as a leader, planning out
and leading the charge for events as well as stepping back, listening to others' ideas, and following the
plans of my peers to execute events.

I have positive peer and intergenerational relationships.

Talking to my parents, teachers, friends, and peers I found that there are not very many people who don’t
like me. This has been something that I have been striving for since I was young and will continue to
work for, as I leave high school and go to university. I live for connection and social events to build
community and friendships which doesn’t help my problem with overcommitment, but I often find the
payoff of creating new friendships worth it in the end. Sometimes I can feel lonely in the sense that I
might have a lot of friendships and peers, but not very many are close or very personal, which is also the
type of relationship I look for. It often brings me happiness when I can use the connections or friendships
I have to strengthen the friendships or relationships of others whom I care about, which also helps me get
closer to the people I help and often brings more new connections to other people.

Weakness:
I can identify and appreciate different perspectives on issues and use and evaluate strategies to resolve
problems.
When it comes to solving conflicts between two parties I am usually pretty good about finding a solution
that can work in benefit for both through compromise. I am also pretty good about de-escalating conflicts
as I can remain calm, and have learned to collect information through listening to both sides to understand
a way to resolve the conflict. However where I am almost always guaranteed to falter is when there are
more than two parties in a conflict, or if I’m not in a relaxed and ready mindset. In cases similar to these I
can get stressed, lash out, or worsen the conflict, which is not a good thing for a leader or someone who is
going to university where there will be a lot of stress and conflict with work, labs, and projects. When
upset or stressed I often fail to see the bigger picture or any side other than my own, even if the other
argument(s) are understandable and get through to me, getting stuck in an ever-deepening spiral.

Critical Thinking:
Strengths:
I can ask good-quality questions, gather relevant information, and come up with well-developed
conclusions.
This is a skill that I struggled with for a long time in school, but finally grasped it last year in English 11
and fully explored it this year in BCFP12. In BC First Peoples we were constantly practicing asking
questions and diving into them to formulate our own answers. For our final project, we were tasked to
research a residential school through the Residential School Database online, searching for documents
relating to a statement or question of our choosing. I came up with the statement, “Inadequate funding for
Christie Residential School created terrible living conditions, leading to avoidable deaths”. Diving deeper
into the scandals and tragic deaths within the school to discover the root causes of death and uncover
some hidden intentions relating to the terrible quality of the Residential School despite receiving some
form of funding. Using all the information we gathered to create a PowerPoint with key points and a
conclusion paper, explaining the connections and our own speculated reasoning for actions that took place
in Residential Schools.

I can explore and create new ways to represent my learning around a variety of problems, events, issues,
and needs.
Referring back to the Residential School research project, part of the project was to create a unique way
to display the information we found. Choosing between a poster, binder/research package, PowerPoint,
and an essay, I ended up choosing the PowerPoint format because I had never gone super in-depth in
terms of design with a PowerPoint before and had been exploring it in the BCFP12 class for different
projects. With this final project, I decided to go all out on design after completing the research portion of
the project. I spent time messing around with different tools to understand what they did, eventually using
animations, transitions, and different design elements to make the PowerPoint feel like you are actually in
a dark room, reading through documents from the archive like a detective attempting to solve a case.
Another project has been the “All About Me Poster” and “Mirror Assignment” which allowed me to
express myself through imagery and wording, combining the two to create a story of my life.

Weakness:
I can analyze and critique my work and my learning.
Taking any sort of criticism has always been hard for me as for a long time I forced myself to try and be
perfect in everything I do. Disregarding criticism as a fluke or the person giving it was in the wrong, even
if it was constructive or suggestive, I would rather believe some reasoning I made up in my head in why I
don’t need the criticism. I worked on understanding criticism from others with my counselor and learning
to criticize my work while working on it rather than waiting to receive criticism until after the
assignment. However, when I do receive suggestions after an assignment I can struggle to remember or
put them into the next assignment. This often causes me to make the same mistake over and over with
every assignment I complete in a class, especially written ones. This is something I am focusing on
correcting right now, as I can’t learn from my mistakes if I can’t interpret previous mistakes to avoid
making them on future assignments.

Creative Thinking:
Strengths:
I can create new and unique ideas that may provide new perspectives that influence how people think
about topics.
Going back to resolving conflicts, most of the time when trying to figure out a resolution I have to come
up with a third party, combining both sides. I do this by adding an element of my ideas to freshen up the
conflict and take some of the focus off of the clashing opinions. I also use something called a “half glass
full” mentality, looking at the positives in a negative situation someone may be in. When I was working
on the ping-pong ball launcher with my dad last weekend we ran into many problems, from parts of the
launcher breaking, not having the right tools, and the launcher just not launching anything. Every time
something like that happened, we both just decided to laugh it off and looked at the positive of spending
father, and son bonding time on family day and that we were just awesome engineers building a device to
save the planet.

I can use the environment around me, including others, and my unconscious mind to generate new ideas.
With the amount of ideas that constantly flow out of my head in a minute, I can call this one of my
strongest strengths. I can be sitting in class, walking home, playing a video game, messing with the guitar,
or doing pretty much anything when ideas start flowing in my head. Dreaming is also a very good way for
me to come up with ideas because I’d say 3 out of 7 days of the week I have a ridiculously wild dream
that with some tweaks could easily be turned into the plot of a fantasy movie such as a dream I wrote
down from last week about a floating town that lives in a massive water-filled crater like a giant lake and
the town is constantly plagued by a supernatural being that lurks in the depths of the lake, that needs to be
appeased with sacrifices annually. Another time I came up with an entirely new way to play paintball
adding umbrellas as a melee form of paintball action, fully fleshing out how the game would be played,
and engineering a plethora of ideas for how an umbrella could be turned into a safe and fun paintball
weapon.

Weakness:
I can persevere, and understand that failure can be productive.
I have struggled with accepting failure for a long time, especially with the understanding that it can be
productive. Over time I have developed the ability to persevere through smaller to medium mistakes that
only really affected me, but when it comes to larger mistakes that affect others, that’s where I can struggle
to persevere and the mistake can stay stuck in my head for weeks. While these large mistakes are stuck in
my head I don’t usually think about why I made the mistake or how I could have prevented it for a long
time, until I sit down and think about the mistake in a good mindset, then figure out what I can learn from
it. There are some large mistakes I continue to make subconsciously until I realize it is too late and have
to repeat the cycle of confusion and learning over again. I continue to work at learning from my mistakes
and failures as I develop as a person and push myself harder to avoid making the same mistakes.

Communication:
Strengths:
I can listen, learn to contribute meaningfully to discussion and debate, consider different perspectives, and
build consensus.
After working with two different facilities teams over two summers both with different people with
different attributes and characters. I have learned strategies to listen to different perspectives, team-build
through discussion, solve problems to come up with a common consensus and figure out a plan. In the
second summer especially, I made sure that the group stayed tight, motivated, and feeling like a
community rather than co-workers. However, especially with bad weather or the inevitability of getting
tired of one another after a while, I had to be able to consider everyone’s perspective and sit the team
down to discuss their issues in a friendly debate/discussion, letting everyone share their voice, then
working to solve the problem from there.

I can work with other students to plan, inquire, and solve problems.
This year and last year I was in the REC Leadership course offered in the school. The main skills we learn
and practice in the course are community building and communication, through that, we have to learn to
work in a variety of teams especially when it comes to our promo groups. In our promo groups, a team of
6-8 people chooses or develops an event we want to run to build community within our school. In the
group I was in we decided to tackle the Mountain Manor event we had just started hosting the previous
year, which is one of the largest events we run in the school. To tackle the sheer size of the promo we
decided to break up into individuals or duos taking on smaller bits of what needed to be done, planning
and communicating along the way to make sure everything was on schedule and also making sure to ask
for help or getting input on decisions that would be bigger than a single person.

Weakness:
I can engage in deep and meaningful inquiry for a variety of purposes and audiences.
Something I struggled to figure out while brainstorming for my capstone was coming up with my inquiry
question. I don’t remember getting a lot of practice coming up with inquiry questions for topics or
subjects till last year in genocide studies when we did it twice for research projects. We also did them this
year in BCFP12 for I believe 2 or 3 research projects with one of them being given to us by the teacher.
With my lack of knowledge in creating inquiry questions, I believe that it would be a struggle to come up
with a meaningful inquiry question on any topic. However, on topics that I have become knowledgeable
on such as the history of Indigenous peoples in Canada, coming up with an inquiry question for our final
assignment wasn’t impossible but it wasn’t easy either. I still had to do loads of extra research before even
beginning to fathom a question. So going into Careers and English, I am hoping to develop my skills in
creating inquiry questions before I hit University level, where they are crucial.

Personal & Cultural Identity

Strengths:
I understand that culture is a broad concept that includes things like my geographic region, nationality,
sex/gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality, language, and religion.
I believe that culture is ever-changing and growing, which has helped me understand where I am in my
life and also has helped me understand the perspective of many of the people around me. Knowing so
many people from different backgrounds and getting to know them has been an eye-opening experience.
I’ve carried the knowledge over into working with children at camp, who haven’t quite discovered their
place yet and might need guidance or support. Even though I worked on the Facilities team during my
time at camp, I still got to bond and spend time with the campers who came and asked questions or
needed support with issues they might be having, so I took time to make sure I could help them learn
about who they are, taking safe risks, and allowing them to step outside of their comfort zone.

I understand what is important to me.

Just like culture, I am also ever-changing, and even when my brain fully develops I will still be learning
about myself and having what is important to me change over time. At the moment I have developed key
things that are important to me, physical things such as my cats and dog, my friends, and my family all of
whom I would protect with my life. I also have mental importance as well such as trying to be kind to
everyone, cleaning up after myself and others (leaving a space better than I found it), giving my all to
support the people I care about, trying to help save the planet in any way I can and understanding that
some things we just have to let go. Understanding that we all have to let go is something I have struggled
with for a long time and am still trying to figure out now, but slowly I am working with myself and the
people I trust to figure out this importance in my life, which would help bring a lot of peace to my life.

Weakness:
I understand how what I value has and will shape my choices.
I thought I knew how my values impacted my choices, but after looking back at some of the mistakes I
made and also thoroughly looking through the 16 personalities reflection. I realized that I didn’t
understand how my values impacted my choices nearly as much as I thought. One example being a friend
of mine who worked with me on the facilities team, who I felt was getting into some bad relationship at
the time, and I ended up making them hate me for a while because I was subconsciously being
overprotective of my friend even though they were more than capable of handling the relationship and
ended up handling the situation on their own. Looking at the 16 personalities was also crazy to me how
after matching my personality, there were so many explanations of behaviors and work habits I didn’t
even realize I was doing till really thinking about it some being overbearing which connects back to the
story about my friend, and some being positive. This made me realize I need to focus on both the
positives and negatives to catch them when I make a decision and to learn more about how my values
impact my decisions.