As students arrive for their first experience in the CLEOS lab, there are typically several questions that resonate throughout the group: What are we going to be doing here today? What is this experience all about? What am I going to learn?
While uncertainty about these types of questions can certainly be unsettling, rest assured that the CLEOS experience is a positive one that will provide you with invaluable knowledge about your personality, your creativity, and what activities get you into "flow." Most importantly, however, you can benefit from the experience of our counselors, who will help you integrate all that information into a comprehensive whole that you can use as you face difficult decisions about college, careers, and life in general. The CLEOS experience consists of carefully chosen psychological assessments, a group discussion led by an expert in creativity, a KU campus tour, guided meditation activities, and one-on-one mentoring sessions with one of our counselors.
Students selected for the CLEOS program are nominated by their teachers, counselors, or gifted program coordinators based on their high creative potential. Creativity can be found in a variety of different aspects of life both inside and outside of the classroom, and we are proud that our students represent all different varieties of creative expression. Gifted athletes, artists, engineers, storytellers, leaders, musicians, problem solvers, and countless others can benefit from the experience, and we are thrilled to have seen a great variety of creative young personalities in our lab.
Creativity is a mental process that involves generating new ideas, concepts, or associations between existing ideas. Although this seems intuitive and simple, it is actually rather complex. Creativity is often associated with art and literature; however, it is also essential to invention as well as professions such as business, leadership, teaching, entertainment, science, and the healing arts. Many students will go on to create careers that are as of yet unknown. There are three reasons why people are driven to be creative:
- A need of novel, complex, and varied stimulation
- A need to communicate ideas and values
- A need to solve problems
Over time, creativity has been attributed to various sources: Divine intervention, cognitive processes, the social environment, personality traits, and chance (accident or serendipity). People also associate creativity with genius, madness, and humor. Finally, creativity is often closely associated with a state of intense psychological concentration known as "flow."