## Leadership / Community _Describe an example of a_ **leadership** _experience in which you’ve positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes, or contributed to group efforts over time._ _What have you done to make your_ **school or your community a better place**_?_ Although I only stayed at this school for two years, one thing that I blieve will be remembered me for years to come is the fact that I reshaped the media landscape of the campus. Before I came, our school only has a newspaper that is barely running. The team came up with a theme each month and receive submissions from the student body. There is no sense of passion regarding what are we talking about and little interaciton or feedback. What is our impact and why are we doing this? I led the team through a brainstorm and discussion into why are we doing this and what's the impact we hope to achieve. We came across several consensus 1. we need a clear nission statement & value proposition 2. we need to track and measure our effectiveness (in achieving the mission 3. we need to better engage the larger community, foster an environment that encourages deep sharing and deep conversation, and avoid self-entertainment Our solution is to self-revolutionize -- transform our current paperback edition to an interactive online community. We will start up publishing more of the pieces online, and graudally add more interactive functions such as group posts and school events. People will be able to comment under each other's post and respond. There are indeed lots of technical difficulties involved, such as GDPR concern, safeguaridng, etc. But we continued to push it with the school admin, and make it happen. Besides the newspaper, another friend of mine who is passionate about film is devoted to start a school TV -- uniting the community through visual story-telling. Together, we co-founded the UWC TV and made it the first TV in this campus. We would film bi-weekly episodes featuring school events and certain individuals, and screen it with the community. I tried to push it even further and suggested that the UWC TV should not be limited to our own campus -- instead, it has the potential to become a cross UWC campuses thing -- something that bonds not just our campus, but different UWC campuses all across the world. This stemmed form our observaiton that currently the UWC movement feel fragmented -- campuses and isolated both geographically and information wise, and students don't feel connected by a common mission. We hope that UWC TV could he a good starting point to become a common platform for all campuses to collaborate and participate. We didn't have the chance to make this happen, and this stayed on paper. But it is a truly potential idea. If I were to start my high school again, I hope this could happen. --- ## Personal Passion _What would you say is your_ **greatest talent or skill**_? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time?_ The skill I am known for is learning and note-taking, more specifically the niche area of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). I began playing with note-taking apps during Covid, when our school moved online. Learning at home, a priviledge indeed, brought me the newfound freedom of learning on my own on my laptop. I watched a huge amounts of Youtube videos on note-taking methods, apps, and applied to deeply studying a few interesting areas such as complexity science and systems dynamics. Once I began taking notes and building a system around that which helps me capture, organize, synthesize, and produce knowledge and ideas, it's really a compounding wealth -- ideas build on and connect with each other. Something my teacher said in class today resonates with a shower idea from years ago. As of today, I already have almost more than 500,000 words in my "vault". They include from readings notes, essays, to shower thoughts and the next world-changing ideas. I also decided to opensource them all online and build my digital garden. I also make monthly updates on it updaing my monthly progress in life. A lot of my friends who have peeked at my screen and saw my system show great interest. One of the best things I love is walking them through my workflow, and demonstrating why it might be more helpful than writing essays and taking notes on word documents scattered all over desktop. However, setting up such a system isn't easy -- not only does it require the right mindset first before talking about any tool, it always requires some level of configuration and tweaking of existing tools and platforms. However, I really want to help my friends all unlock such a wonderful practice. As a result, recently I began building something for them -- a note-taking app that is beginner-firendly and easy to start with, and that helps my friend transition from scatters note-taking to a cohesive and inter-connected system. Inspired by the crazy progress in AI and code-editing agents, I also designed a custom learning/knowledge-management agent inside the app. include OpenLearn efforts, helping support other's learning ## Creativity and Action _Think about an_ **academic subject** _that inspires you. Describe how you’ve furthered this interest inside and/or outside the classroom._ I was fascinated by "systems" after reading the book "Thinking in Systems" by Donella Meadows. I thought I have found the fundamental truth and principle of the world, which can explain everything from the universe to nature and human societies. The newfound insight the the world works not as isolated objects and components but as inter-connected and relational systems determined by boundary conditions and feedback loops great reshapes my wordview. As a result, I pursued my leanring in System Dynamics in platforms such as the Systems Dynamics Society's online summer course. I grasped a much stronger understanding and learned the application of this area. This also led me to a close and wonderful realm of complexity science. I truly believe these are the frontiers of our human knowledge, and has the potential to become the next paradigm shift after the Newtonian/Decartican Rationalist/Atomic mechanistic worldview, and exactly what our world needs to solve complex problems like climate change or international violence that can't be solved by any specific discipline or subject alone, but that which requires collective effort and lots of coordination. Using my knowledge and understanding and applying in out school setting, I have redesigned a workflow diagram for our School TV team. This used to be quite a lumberson project in which we go through lots of repetive communications and meetings regarding who should do what, at what time, using what equipment, what are the notice points. As a result, I did a comprehensive study of the entire workflow and sysmeized the entire process into a Notion workspace -- now all information, actions, and tracking happen in a single place. A super clear dashboard. Inside our IB curriculum, for Economics spcifically, I have long observed that Our economics courses perpetuate degenerative economic thoughts & harm our planet by perpetuating distorted and mechanist understanding our our economic and ecological systems. We are taught from the first lesson that the world is based on scarcity, which pre-supposed the selfish nature of humanity and determines our competition mindset. We have excluded the "state" from the "market". We are taught that companies maximize profits. We called our planet "externality". This is all due to lots of false assumptions and wrong system boudnaries that renders meaningful particpation and reformation impossible. That is why I am thrilled to learn about the Regenerative Economics Curriclum Movement led by Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann in the European Sustanability and Education conference, who seeks to push for global changes to our economics courses. A truly inspiring figure. I had a long talk with here post-discussion, and I hope to work more closely with her in the future to help make the change happen in more academic institutions. Later I also brought the idea back to our school and invited her as a guest lecture to our school. --- ## Further 升华 _Beyond what has already been shared in your application,_ **what do you believe makes you a strong candidate** _for admission to the University of California?_ Univeristies of California have always had great attraction to me not because of their prestige but because of their culture of building solutions, not just studying problems. Growing up, no matter where I am, oftentimes I got frustrated with my education because I felt it limited more than it helped my learning. I had deep talks with a lot of my subject teachers and even academic coordinators to discuss better ways to run the class, and also issues with the entire school system. Sometimes people would think I am a critic who loves pointing out problems and complain. I deeply believe that studying the problem is the first step towards building a solution. Solution are only possible and can be effective if having analyzed and understood the whole of the problem. However, it's all pointless if we stop at and be satisfied with having criticized the problem but no action is taken. It's like a group of scientists having studied everything they can about climate change, and as a result celebrated their findinds, lean back, and watch the world collapse. Knowledge and learning is meaningless unless turned into action and projects and try to make an impact in the direct interaciton with the world. I built my app and started my learning community with this held in mind. I hope to empower the learning of more people, and I hope that education can truly unlock instead of 扼杀 the potential of humanity as a whole. In fact, I deeply believe our future greatly depends on our education. At UC, I also hope to truly unlock my own potential in making this happen.