My Year in a Nutshell
A right-side-up, upside-down year. Everything from internships to book recommendations.
Dear reader,
So… this is my first newsletter. I’m not quite sure what urged you to click on it, but I’m glad you did. This year has been a whirlwind. From working in nuclear facilities to being on stage in front of BC’s top 400 business people, this is a recap of my year + some book and internet tool recommendations.
5 Bullet-Point Summary + Recs
As always, I like to start with a summary for those who are looking to save time. Here’s what I did in a nutshell…
Restrategized Climate Education Reform BC to focus on ground-level impact.
Led a research project comparing human and AI ability to distinguish AI generated-text and human written-text that won the Ingenious+ Regional Innovation Challenge.
Got interviewed at BC’s Business Laureates Hall of Fame Gala in front of 400+ BC’s top business people.
Interned at UBC TRIUMF Particle Accelerator, a nuclear facility.
Got into The Knowledge Society (TKS), a high school start-up incubator
Books I enjoyed this year…
Fiction: The Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
Biography: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
Non-fiction: The Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum
Useful Internet Tools (that saved my life this year)
Internet Search/Answering Questions: Perplexity AI
Productivity/To-do list organization: Notion
Time Management: Scheduled App
Calendar: Google Calendar (don’t change what’s not broken, right?
The mix of Google Calendar, Scheduled, and Notion run my entire life, without them I’d be a mess.
New School, New Me, or Maybe?
It’s been a wild ride. For the 2022-2023 school year, I moved to the other side of town to attend a school with the IB program. In the first month of school, my teacher quite literally said, “By the end of this program, you will probably cry, see others cry, and/or cry together but that’s all part of the journey.” I’m glad I moved, I was able to explore another world (everything you’ll read about), meet new people, and open my eyes to ALL the possibilities. I wouldn’t be me today otherwise.
Climate Education Reform BC (CERBC)
As a coordinator of Climate Education Reform BC, I’ve seen all the ups and downs throughout my three years. This last year has been interesting, to say the least. The more we talk with politicians, the more difficult it seems to make any progress in implementing an intersectional climate change and justice education into the BC curriculum. Recently, we had a discussion with Ashley Bangsund, VSB’s Sustainability Coordinator, where we chatted about the progress they’ve made on their VSB Sustainability Plan. Fortunately, they’ve been able to get $70,000 this year to dedicate to sustainability initiatives across all VSB schools this year. However, a lot of the, albeit good, progress they’ve made is immeasurable, and that’s a pattern we’re beginning to see across all government bodies. So, we’ve decided to restrategize and take a ground approach to educational reform: working from the bottom up.
With all those issues in mind, we’ve begun working from the school level upwards. Recently, we’ve begun launching CERBC chapters at high schools across VSB to mobilize students to teach climate change topics at local elementary schools. Since the school year has just begun, we’ve yet to present at local schools, but I’ll keep you posted in future newsletters.
Future Science Leaders (FSL)
During my time at FSL Year 1, my group and I lead a research project investigating the human and AI ability to detect their written and generated texts. This project began BEFORE the release of ChatGPT, where we used OpenAI’s LLM Davinci. What I learned is that humans (or students at least) are terrible at distinguishing between AI and human written texts; we are as good at identifying texts as much as flipping a coin, or a monkey throwing bananas at a wall.
We started this project as we were concerned with the rising rate of misinformation and bots on the internet, and how that could affect people’s perception of the world and lead to more polarizing divides. Especially, when we consider how these large language models are trained on humongous data sets that must be impossible to sift for all prejudice, discrimination, and systemic social issues being perpetuated. Since humans are biased, and AI are programmed by humans and taught on human datasets, they will ultimately become prejudiced too. So, moral of the story, be aware of what you consume on the internet in today’s age or you’ll end up believing the wrong things, like the Pope in a puffer jacket.
(Ah, I love a good meme)
Junior Achievement Company Program (JABC)
One of the first extracurriculars I was introduced to when I moved to my new school was Junior Achievement Company Program. Essentially, in 16-weeks, a group of students across Metro-Vancouver create a company, raise funds, produce a product, market, and sell– I know, it’s a lot right? However, during this process, I met invaluable friendships and mentors that I continue to keep in contact today. During this process, my wonderful program coordinator, Christine Stitchman, nominated me for the Junior Achivement Entrepreneurship Award, where 5 students of 60,000 JABC across BC have the chance to win. By the luck of the draw, and the glowing recommendation, I was able to be one of those lucky students and received the opportunity to attend the BC Business Laureates Hall of Fame Gala, as well as a $2,500 award. That night was breathtaking and inspired me to one day walk across that stage as one of its inductees.
TRIUMF Particle Accelerator @UBC
Ok, over the summer I had the amazing opportunity to work at the TRIUMF particle accelerator, a NUCLEAR facility (don’t worry, I wore a dosimeter to track the radiation I was exposed to). If I’m being honest, I had no idea what I was doing there; afterall, I was completely surrounded by PhD, Master, and 3rd and 4th year undergraduates. This experience was very eye opening to the academic setting. I was able to shadow Dr. Stephan Malbrunot, a physicist at CERN, and lead the web-design for his new research group, Radmol. I learned everything from the use of new spectroscopy devices to probe “new physics” beyond the standard model to the details of nuclei that lead to charge parity violations. I also biked 40+ mins everyday to UBC, which was a nice exercise.
The Knowledge Society (TKS)
Recently, I got into the high school start-up incubator program The Knowledge Society (TKS) with a full-ride scholarship and it has been amazing to be surrounded by like-minded peers wanting to change the world. I’m eternally grateful to my cohort’s coordinator, Pranav, for helping me along the way and getting me this opportunity. From my experience thus far, I’ve become completely obsessed with AR/VR and its potential to disrupt the world as we know it, especially in reducing the barriers to a comprehensive, applied education. In the next month or so, I’ll begin trying my hand at developing my own AR glasses, so check my newsletter if you want to follow along.
What’s Next?
Considering it’s my final year of high school, I plan to make the most of my time left. After all, it’s the introduction to the last chapter of the book titled High School. In the next newsletter, you’ll probably read about some AR projects I’m working on and my experience with the college application process.
The End
All in all, the people I met, the friends I made, and my mentors along the way made my year a wonderful one. So, cheers to the people in our lives (yes, that includes YOU too), and thank you for being here to read this. You’re truly appreciated.
A special thanks to all my mentors and advocates…
J. Al-Assadi
D. Hsu
M. Johnson
S. Lau
L. Lopez
J. McQueen
P. Menon
B. Ng
C. Stitchman
N. Tran
W. Yee
First names are abbreviated for privacy. If you’re one of the above, you know who you are, so thank you again :)
Until next time, signing off,
Chloe
If you want to chat (I would love to), feel free to reach out down below