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Hong Kong student Emma Wong arrived on campus at Stanford University earlier this month to begin her freshman year. Her goal for the next four years? To bring a divided world together and to work towards connecting everyone in these challenging times.

Emma Wong, one of the few Chinese students accepted to Stanford this year, touched the Stanford Admissions team, and many other universities, with her belief that music can raise awareness and can encourage everyone to connect and help a common cause. For her Personal Project, a requirement in the IB programme to assess a student’s research, communication, critical and creative thinking, she explored how she could use her passion for music to raise awareness for the refugee crisis. Her project and its goal of raising awareness for the plight of refugees worldwide was a success; she first wrote a song on Syrian refugees - the lyrics inspired by interviews she conducted with them, performed the song at the Personal Project Exhibition and ultimately uploaded it online for all to see. In the end, many offered their assistance to her cause, either financially or ideologically, giving her the opportunity to advocate for some non-profit organizations in Hong Kong that work with asylum seekers. This inspired her to further explore this issue. During her time as a DP student in Victoria Shanghai Academy (VSA), a through-train bilingual IB school in Hong Kong, she gathered more research and learned that the acceptance rate for asylum seekers in Hong Kong is below 1% and that made her interested in refugee law to further help those in need.

She believes that her IB education at VSA, which started since kindergarten, gave her the drive to take initiative in global matters. “We are always taught to look beyond what we are ‘told to learn’ and immerse ourselves into other cultures." says Emma. CAS (Creativity, Activity, Service) trips are a part of the IB programme for students to develop a greater sense of international mindedness and social responsibility. For her CAS trip one year, Emma initiated a trip to Cambodia where she and her classmates worked to connect local villages with one another by building physical bridges out of wooden planks; from cutting down trees to creating the planks, sawing the wooden steps, building the handrails, all of which the students had never done before. She led her peers to step out of their comfort zones and to take risks in the unfamiliar surroundings. Together they were able to achieve their goal of making an impactful difference in the Cambodian villagers’ lives.