## Award / Honor ### John Locke Wrote an Essay arguing all compliance is complicity. ### Harvard Debate Council Summer Workshop (China), 2023 One chosen among about 50 particpants of the 1-week workshop by a Debate professor from Harvard. I engaged actively in the course and won the first place with my teammate in the ending tournament. ## Extracurricular Activity ### Personal Knowledge Sharing I open-sourced my notes (more than 500,000 words) online in my digital garden, including all my reading notes and reflection thoughts. I make monthly updates along with essays, updates on personal projects, photography, and my roadmap. All these are sent as newsletters to about 50 of my friends. I learned marketing and setting up my IP. ### Learning Community I set up a Mastodon server started a challenge for my friends (35 in total) to post at least 100 words something they learned (outside school) every day for 100 days. 21 people end up completing the challenge and winning the award. I learned so much from every one's experience, plus how to maintain an online community. ### Building a Note-taking App Lots of my friends are amazed by my note-taking system but don't have the techinical expertise to configure and set up. So I packed the core functions as an app and give it to my friends. This is the first digital product that I actually ship, and I learned so much about the actual developing pipeline. ### School Newspaper Having taken over our school newspaper as the editor, I figured that it's almost dying and doesn't have impact within our community. So I led my team in transitioning from print to an online platform to boost engagement. The shift required navigating school bureaucracy and overcoming resistance around safeguarding and GDPR concerns. ### School TV Program Dissapoinnted by the lack of sense of community within our school, I started a UWC TV -- we dive into the stories inside our community and feature events and release weekly episodes. I learned how to coordinate a team project through designing a workflow to reduce friction of communication and collaboration. ### Sailing I joined Sailing Club and loved it. It's a great sport requiring lots of teamwork and collaboration, especially the need for effective communicaiton. I learned to how to navigate if one day I am left on an island and have one sailboat with me to travel wherever I want. ### Volunteer / Workshop speaker at PKM Summit 2025 in Utrecht, Netherlands I am a huge nerd of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). I cold emailed the oragnizer of the summit asking for opportunities to be a volunteer and workshop speaker. At my mini-workshop, proposed the concept of Collective Knowledge Management and advocated for integration of KM with education. Learned so much from experts of this field. ### Transformative Education Hub Germany I joined this 3-day program with other Education workers from the UWC movement to discuss opportunities and methodologies of transformative education. Lots of insightful people and points! Also made me think about organize a UWC Short Course on my own. ### Band Leader I learned to do actual music with people I love. Performed “Another Brick in the Wall (Pt. 2)” by Pink Floyd (that goes like "we don't need no education") in UWC Changshu with my band at the graduation celebration. ### Stanford SPICE US–China Co-Lab on Climate Solutions I learned from leading climate experts on possibilites of US-China collaboration on climate mitigation and adaptation with high school students from the US. We also did a mini collaboration project on protecting pollinators in our community. ## Additional Information Here are the links to some of the projects that I mentioned: Larc Mini (note-taking app with AI) prototype -- [https://larcmini.app](https://larcmini.app/) OpenLearn Community prototype -- [https://learninginpublic.space](https://learninginpublic.space/) A Book I wrote called "The Education I want" -- [https://theeducationiwant.my](https://theeducationiwant.my/); [https://read.theeducationiwant.my](https://read.theeducationiwant.my/) I shared this book with a lot of UWC students and teachers, and got a lot of heart-warming responses. I'd like to copy-paste one response from a teacher at UWC Mahindra. "You are perfectly clear, and you are absolutely right in your critical evaluation of education systems and the institutional regimentation of knowledge. I think I’m also slightly disillusioned with UWC’s vision, and many of us are fighting more and more for freedom and interconnectedness in our pedagogy. It sincerely feels like a David v/s Goliath fight right now, I feel we are failing all students, and students are also either disengaged or complacent. We are not given time to think, innovate or just iterate, creativity is just not encouraged in teaching. Please don’t drop out. You are one of the most thoughtful students I’ve ever had, the kind of student who makes us want to keep fighting the good fight." Here are my homes on the internet: Homepage (my essays, photography, and more) -- [https://jimmyzhang.org](https://jimmyzhang.org/) Opensource notes of over  500,000 words, with monthly updates-- [https://jimmyzhang.space](https://jimmyzhang.space/) My Roadmap & "Garage" -- [https://roadmap.jimmyzhang.org](https://roadmap.jimmyzhang.org/) I don't want to flood this section with links, but here's a name card I designed for myself just last weekend if you are still interested: [https://j1m.my](https://j1m.my/)