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Friends used to call her "Cicy" instead of her Chinese name-Zhang Shengnan, because she always looked "international". Whether she developed her own non-profit organization "Youth Power" during her college years or worked as an intern, volunteer and even became a professional lecturer in 24 countries before she graduated from college, she was admired by countless people.
She just graduated from 20 16 and became one of the final candidates for Rhodes Scholarship 13. Although she didn't succeed in the end, she also frankly faced that "success and failure will not change a person, they are just high points and low points in the dynamic balance of life."
Today's light clouds are actually self-confidence and calmness accumulated from previous failures. Exams and competitions can never define her. Whether she suffered from "Waterloo" in the college entrance examination four years ago or was rejected to apply for Rhodes Scholarship now, it can't stop her from continuing to believe in herself, nor can it stop her from keeping her enthusiasm and achieving that goal step by step.
Stubbornness of "bottoming out"
Zhang Shengnan has entered the end of the gap year and will go to Harvard University to study pedagogy. She has been waiting for this opportunity for two years. In her junior year, she also had a "glorious time". She brushed GRE TOEFL to prepare application materials and went all out to enter her dream school, Harvard, but she finally got an offer from Columbia University. Just like four years ago, I missed Peking University.
The college entrance examination four years ago was the first "trough" in her life. She went to a foreign language school from Peking University 100, her first choice. She felt that all her efforts in high school for three years were in vain. She wondered if it would be more cost-effective to spend three years on improving comprehensive ability. It was the first time that she thought about whether she lost her practical ability because of the framework restriction of exam-oriented education, and whether these rules could really measure and define herself.
Since then, she has been telling herself: "Don't listen to people saying that you don't have much hope. Sometimes some standards will be broken and lucky exceptions will appear. If you miss it, it's their regret, not yours. " With such stubbornness, she decided to "copy the bottom" and was denied in this value system. Why not reshape a more diversified system?
With this in mind, she and two other friends joined a public welfare project to cultivate middle school students' leadership, which was carried out by the Ministry of Education. She hopes to get middle school students out of the classroom and serve the community. On the one hand, she can improve their practical ability instead of just burying themselves in the classroom to do superficial credits. On the other hand, she can cultivate their awareness of caring about society.
At that time, her leadership project was only carried out in several middle schools in Beijing, but they wanted to promote it nationwide, and the person in charge of the project also had this idea. So Sheng Nan proposed that the project should be undertaken by student organizations, and then the existing school resources should be promoted, and the "youth power" came into being. At first, the promotion didn't go as smoothly as she thought. Most high school principals don't want to join in, thinking that it is unsafe to take students out of the classroom and it will waste their study time, which makes her very depressed. Her educational ideas were directly denied by educational decision makers. She began to make a breakthrough, first cooperating with the top universities in China 100, and then taking these successful cases as examples, inviting other schools to join.
Up to now, "Youth Power" has established workstations in more than 20 cities, covering more and more colleges and universities, and its influence is growing. More importantly, the high school students involved have begun to pay attention to the communities around them. By carrying out public welfare projects to solve problems or providing reports to the government and the community to improve public policies, high school students' critical thinking ability and practical ability have been greatly improved, which is undoubtedly a great progress in middle school education.
Hohhot No.2 Middle School once launched a public welfare project called "Orange House"-providing a rest stop for sanitation workers. Students learned that sanitation workers have no place to rest after work, so they began to visit relevant departments, called on social forces, drew patterns, established a long-term operation mechanism, and came up with the design scheme of "orange house" in detail and in detail. These rest stops are equipped with hot water and instant noodles. In addition to establishing a rest stop for sanitation workers, they also talked about cooperation with some retail stores, hoping that these retail stores can serve as love stations to provide hot water for sanitation workers.
In addition, middle school students will also put forward suggestions to improve public policies through investigation and research. For example, a project team of Guangzhou Zhixin Middle School put forward it, which is called "Saving Venice". There was a lot of rain in Guangzhou from June to February in 5438, and the waterlogging was very serious. However, many drainage systems in Guangzhou are very old and have not been planned and maintained for a long time.
The students of Zhixin Middle School found this problem during the investigation, so they did a lot of field investigations, provided an application report to the Guangzhou municipal government where the drainage system needed maintenance, and put forward various ideas for flood prevention, which were finally adopted by the Guangzhou municipal government.
Through these public welfare projects, students participate in social affairs, give play to their talents and abilities, and improve themselves in practice. This is the original intention of "Youth Power". In this way, Zhang Shengnan put his educational thoughts into practice step by step. When the "youth power" encountered the "bottleneck period" of development, she began to force herself to think, what would happen without the "youth power"? She found that the current situation would not be much different, and the significance of the existence of "youth power" was not as grand as imagined, which made her eager to learn from a larger environment and open her mind.
Open the door to explore the world.
As a "youth force", she also joined AIESEC. Because of her outstanding ability, she entered the management of AIESEC. By chance, she started her first trip abroad and went to Egypt, which was turbulent because of the political revolution at that time.
At that time, the Egyptian president had just stepped down, and demonstrations were held in various places. Many domestic political forces were fighting and the traffic was basically paralyzed. She is doing one of her own research projects, and she wants to know whether the life of Muslims in Ramadan in Egypt is as described in the news. In order to complete the project, she and a Fudan student "broke the blade" on the cusp.
They were robbed during a visit. The other party pretended to be a plainclothes policeman and took them to visit a place, and they believed it. When they arrived in a sparsely populated place, the robbers exposed lost face and took their mobile phones and cameras. They chased the robbers to an alley and shouted for help to attract nearby residents before subduing them.
However, the story does not end here. At that time, the Egyptian public sector was completely paralyzed. They don't know that the police who confiscate things are worse than robbers. The police hypocritically hope that they can provide evidence to prove that they are the owners of mobile phones and cameras. Afterwards, they finally realized that the police wanted to pay bribes. As a last resort, they took the police to court and got their property back through legal channels.
In this "thrilling" competition, Sheng Nan became more brave and open. She saw the world's good and evil, light and darkness. Her heart is like a container full of youthful passion and spirit, and she has an impulse to connect with the world. In a larger environment, she believes that her perspective will be shaped more comprehensively, and she wants experience to define herself.
After that, she tried to seize various opportunities to go to Morocco, Israel, Vietnam, South Korea and other 23 countries for internships or volunteer work, paying attention to the future development and expectations of young people in different countries, and making her think about what positive things she can bring to the country.
She likes what Mr. Lu Xun once said best: endless distances and endless people are all related to me. So she chose education. She chose this career which concerns thousands of people and families in Qian Qian. She hopes that she can provide a value system for educational decision-makers to measure students from multiple levels, rather than just relying on academic performance to judge whether a student is good or bad.
In her life, students can have a variety of learning methods to choose from, instead of being locked in the classroom; The ideal way of learning is that students can learn in their own habits and be evaluated in their own habits. For example, if a student is talented in dancing, she can show her growth this semester through dancing. If a student is interested in insects, he can show you his harvest this semester with an insect research report. In this way, every student can be encouraged in what he is good at and get room for growth.
After her senior year, she chose gap to take a one-year business course at Watson University, thus introducing a new business model for "Youth Power". Watson University in Boardell, Colorado, USA is "the first incubator university that can award diplomas".
When attending the business incubator course, he will learn MBA courses, such as how to make financial budget, how to manage the company team and how to assess talents. At the same time, she tries to make her business alive, so graduates will basically register their own business, just like chickens slowly hatched in eggs, which makes her feel very satisfied.
During her six months at Watson University, her growth curve has been rising sharply.
She learned a lot of hard things, such as how to manage a team, how to raise funds, how to communicate with people professionally and so on. In terms of soft power, the biggest change is the change of her learning thinking mode; When you want to do something, learn how to prove the feasibility of the idea, how to learn something new from past successes and failures, how to collect effective feedback in practice to fix it, and finally put it into practice. At the same time, she also came into contact with many "pioneers" in the field of social innovation in the course. Their operating concept of non-profit organizations made Zhang Shengnan have a new plan for the development of "youth organizations".
Non-profit organizations in China are still isolated, and most of the four subjects, government, enterprises and the helped groups, are separated. Therefore, I hope that in the process of organizing "Youth Power", I can establish contacts between them, such as connecting "Youth Power" with CSR department of enterprises, so as to provide middle school students with opportunities to visit and some courses on leadership, and help them make a good plan for their study career. "
Zhang Shengnan has been moving towards that goal in her mind, hoping that one day in the future she can provide an evaluation system that can give students room to grow up, so she chose to study pedagogy to make it possible.
Now, Zhang Shengnan wants everyone to call her China-a better girl than men. How can she think that every step she has taken since then is to outline a surprise and fearless life track? The road of life is vast, why should she frame herself in the standard definition of others?