L.E.A.F. - Project E-Du-Waste

Since last September, I founded a project together with another 3 Singaporeans at Berkeley and participated in a grant-funding competition called Big Ideas @ Berkeley, which awards prize money to fund innovative ideas. We are now entering a video contest for a People's Choice Award as part of the competition, and winning the Award is based on purely YOUR votes, so every vote counts! Please vote for our video and help us pass the video link on to your friends. You can help us make this happen!

Click here to vote. (You'll need a Facebook account, and you need to allow access to the Contests app). Thank you very much!

Here's more information about our project and what we do:
L.E.A.F. (Leverage Environmental Education, Act for Future Generations) is founded to provide an innovative approach to address environmental issues that are not being addressed effectively. To achieve a long-term and effective impact, our team is focusing on education of children most affected by poverty caused by these environmental issues. We propose an initial approach in the form of an experiential camp. According to the performance of the camp and the response we receive from schools and students, the educational model can be delivered in other forms and incorporated in school curricula in the future.

LEAF’s educational model emphasizes the teaching of soft skills essential in the 21st Century through interactive methods. By providing hands-on and innovative lessons across disciplines like Art, Science and English, our team aims to raise students’ awareness of multiple perspectives to problems, and consequently to equip them with the ability to develop different viewpoints to any single issue. Students can develop better teamwork, communication and critical thinking skills, which allows them to assess and more effectively address the environmental problems and poverty around them. Eventually, our team aims to enable the students to higher education and better employment, helping them escape the poverty cycle.

Developed countries like the US, Europe and Japan have been continuously dumping E-waste to various parts of developing countries, thus straining the sustainability of the local environment and health of their residents. It is a severe poverty issue because E-waste recycling is usually carried out by poverty-stricken and socially marginalized groups who are forced to rummage through and handpick waste for survival. Thus L.E.A.F's first project E-Du-Waste targets Guiyu, China, which is the largest dumping ground of E-waste in the world. Current efforts to address this issue have been ineffective due to economic incentives associated with the thriving E-waste industry, and poor legislative enforcement in China.

Our team currently focuses on educating middle school students in Guiyu. In collaboration with environmental groups in Chinese universities and UC Berkeley students, we will organize a 5-day educational camp for each targeted school to equip the local students with critical thinking skills and insights on environmental issues. The camp comprises interactive education in the disciplines of English, Art, Film and Science, facilitated by college student volunteers in the relevant majors. At the end of the camp, participants will present their work to the public. Our team may produce publicity material based on the camp and make it available to E-waste recycling centers to raise public awareness.

The students, inspired by their interaction with the university students from China and the US, can be motivated to seek higher education and avoid harmful E-waste recycling jobs in the future. Based on our experience gained from the educational camp in Guiyu, we can further improve this model in the future to impact a larger audience more effectively. Our educational model can potentially be used by other advocate groups that are addressing similar politically sensitive issues. Please vote for our video and support us in our project!

whyyy

i can't believe i just rejected a research project. what in the world am i thinking??? so many students out there would die to have the offer for the project T.T it's under such a prestigious professor and at the cool science labs of lawrence berkeley labs, and it's on superconductors and has real-world applications! sigh.

i'm hoping to get another research project though, and this one i got offered would take up too much of my time and i have to travel up the hills to the labs, which would be really time consuming too. i don't really want to compromise my studies, especially since i'm alrd overloading and taking really hard classes that can only get harder from here on, and i still want to do tutoring and a lot of other stuff, and apply for internships and go for career fairs etc.

i feel really bad though, the scientist spent quite some time explaining the projects and bringing me around the labs. if only i had more time for me to decide, if he gave me till next week for me to confirm whether i got the other project, i would say yes. T.T

though he would be better off with another student who can commit more time and effort. T.T sigh. why i like that.

soprano

can't wait to watch this! i love the hunger games trilogy, if you haven't read it alrd you should! especially before the movie comes out hee, hopefully it won't be a letdown the way movies that come from books tend to be...


so far the trailer looks kindof different from my expectations, the setting looks a lot more modern than i imagined, but the entire cast looks better than i imagined so that's great haha. hair colours and eye colours are all right so i'm happy haha.

i got into gospel chorus class! it's a singing class that involves sightsinging and gospel music, and we get to perform on stage quite a few times as part of our grade! it required auditions and i was kindof sick and i thought i wouldn't get in because they had to cut more than 100 people from the auditions, but i made it! my singing wasn't as bad as i thought xD

anddddd i discovered i'm actually a soprano! soprano sounds so cool, like prima donna and first lady xD i got allocated to soprano 2, and i was like whoa. i always thought i was an alto xD seems like i can sing both! lalala i'm really excited about this class, first time i'm doing singing in a more formal setting, hope i'll get to learn a lot about gospel music and singing properly! it's been a while since i've done music, so hopefully i'm not -too- rusty, especially in reading music and stuff.

also, i was very touched by this song by demi lovato, "Skyscraper". Her singing style is so different in here, i could feel the pain in her voice and all that she had to go through to sing like that...my respect for her increased a thousandfold. i think she had an eating disorder and depression because of the pressure to look good in front of the camera. she has an awesome voice and i think she should focus on that instead though.