Speaker 1: whose schedule goes a little something like this. Wake up, school, extracurricular activity, homework, more homework, studying, more studying, and in the end, maybe, just maybe, a little bit of sleep. Show of hands? We have a lot of old people in the room. OK. Well, mind us too. My name is Jean Lauren, your typical teenager, only that I choose to actively stand up against low expectations. Now, I'm not as artistic as Walt Disney, who began making animations at age 21, nor am I a genius like Mark Zuckerberg, who founded and became CEO of Facebook by age 20. I still need to ask for permission before I use the bathroom. In fact, if I were asked five years ago if I had accomplished anything important or impactful in my life, I would absolutely, most positively, have said no. I was an ordinary student, not someone that stood out in a crowd. I loved attention, but I never seemed to get any. I was a loud kid, but no one seemed to be listening to me. I had a passion to be up and out there, doing something important. But what did I know? I was only 11. I was a kid, now I'm a teenager. This automatically meant that, like for many of us, people's expectations are low. Have you noticed? Like really low. Pay attention in school. Get good grades. Don't smoke or do drugs. Did your chores yesterday without complaining? Good job. Here's i5. Of course, this doesn't mean that getting good grades doesn't require work. It just feels like a pretty low bar to clear. Why is society's expectations so low? Do any of you find this slightly insulting? Why are our standards a little higher, or even a lot higher, so that we could also challenge ourselves to reach higher goals? This realization came to me around this time last year, when I became the main head student leader of my first ever major service project. But before we get into that story, we need some context. Last year, when COVID first struck, remember that? COVID. My family was forced to return to the Philippines until the situation had settled. A whole nine months. I lived in China my whole life, so this was the first time I had spent such a long time in my hometown. Electricity went out pretty frequently, and it was hard. I mean, no internet. There were chickens and goats everywhere. Roosters crowed every five seconds, and the town was pitch black in the nighttime. But like the rest of the world, Philippines was both severely and negatively impacted by the pandemic. People lost their jobs and had to work under the constant threat of getting infected, just so that they can earn money to feed their families. My family was fortunate, because my parents still had their jobs and worked as teachers through online learning and Zoom calls. But this experience really let me see the world through a different lens. As a family project during my time there, me and my family were able to raise some money and had the privilege to go house to house in my village's poor areas, where we gave bags of rice and bags of milk to families who needed it the most. This experience was unbelievably eye-opening. I've lived such a privileged life, never needing to worry about where my next meal will come from or if we had enough money to ensure my health. And here were children playing in slippers too small for their feet, not having a care in the world. So how dare I? How dare I keep this wealth and privilege to myself? When I returned to China, I had an epiphany in the airport. A random surge of motivation and desire. I want to send some of my old things I was no longer using in China back to my neighbors in the Philippines. Because after my experience there, I realized that I had a lot and they didn't. So I told my mom and she agreed to this idea and then contacted the shipping company that sent us a box around this tall and this wide. And we were able to fill with all the stuff we no longer needed to send to my neighbors in the Philippines. When I started attending school after weeks of quarantine, my school's student leaders decided to assemble and brainstorm possible service project ideas for the year. It's important to state that this is quite normal for my school since we're already very big on service and youth leadership. I brought up the idea of sending some goods to the Philippines. Why? To this day, I still don't know what initiated me to bring it up. But I'm glad I did because this was the start of my service project, Hope for the Holidays. Hope for the Holidays is a toys, books, and clothes drive involving my whole school. It started as a simple idea. It started as a single box. It started as a seed. Before I knew it, I was in charge of organizing this huge project, telling people what to do, telling people when to do it, talking with more people, more meetings with principals, teachers, students. At one point, it was too much for me to handle alone. I needed help. I needed help from my school's math department, from my school's operations team, from my parents. I also needed leaders to be in charge of the specific aspects of the project, like for the collection process, for the arts and publications, for the packing. These leaders will also need a team. So I had to think about who to involve in their team and who else I should involve in this project. This brought up even more work. Just like when snow begins to fall on the ground and you want to build a snowman, things just kept piling and piling on, large quantities of books were too heavy to be sent to the Philippines. Large toys couldn't fit in the boxes. Winter clothes won't be needed where it's going. And so we decided to split up the donations. All of the books and half of the toys will be sent to a local Chinese elementary school as a way to give back to our local community. And then all of the clothes and the other half of the toys will be sent to impoverished communities in the Philippines as a way to give back to our international community. This brought up even more work. But in the end, through the Hope for the Holidays service project, after months of planning and 10 days of collecting, we collected a total of 3,452 donations. We collected 921 toys, 1,227 clothes, and 1,304 books from our student body for these children. It was not easy. It was a lot of time sacrificed and a lot of sleep lost, but I would not have exchanged this experience for the world. I had to continually challenge myself to redraw my lines and limitations. It turns out I can't do everything by myself. It turns out it was so much easier when there were people standing behind me. It turns out I was still capable of changing the world. Normally, our school would go to a foreign location like Laos or the Philippines to do our service projects, but COVID-19 made this impossible. It didn't make it impossible, however, for us to still impact the world. This service project, along with all of my school service projects, are completely student-led. Teachers were there to only supervise. So what did I learn from this experience? Well, I learned how to make Excel spreadsheets, and I actually enjoyed it. I learned how to write emails, how to organize meetings, and I was able to create relationships with the people I had worked with. I learned that so many students out there had so much hidden potential just waiting to be tapped on. But most of all, I learned that we, a group of young, inexperienced teenagers, were still capable of organizing and executing such a big project. So why do you need to know this? Why does anyone need to know this? Well, I'm here on the stage because I challenged myself to reach higher. I've taken the gifts I've been given, the gifts of communication, relationships, privilege, along with this amazing opportunity to do something great. And I believe everyone in this room has that ability as well. We are the future of this world, our generation. And since I'm an absolute Disney fanatic, I must include a little magical touch. Pocahontas, one saying, how high can a sycamore grow? But if you cut it down, then you'll never know. When you embrace the low expectations of the world, you're cutting down your own sycamore tree. We're still growing. We're still experimenting our likes and dislikes, finding our passions. So don't stop this journey and keep growing. Just like how you need to study and practice for a test, which I really should have been doing in exam week, you need to gain experience in life. So gain experience. Right now, grow your leadership skills, listening skills, compassion skills, speech skills. Make your own opportunities and involve yourself now. The world has a very dim view of our generation. They're not very optimistic about us and we're left with a broken world that we have to fix. Overpopulation, global warming, poverty, why wait when you can make a change now? We have the heart and we can build the experience. So be a leader, take charge, and stand up for what you know is right. I'm going to let you decide what to do now, but I'm raising our standards. Let me encourage you. What will you do to change the world? To conclude, I want everyone to raise up their hands as high as they can. Higher, like stand up if you need to, as high as you can. Stand up, as high, like actually stand up. As high as you can. Wow, okay. I told you, you can always reach for higher. Thank you. Thank you.