March 💖
The MasterCard Foundation, graphene, and Intentionality
Hey hey! How’s it going?🤩 I’m doing fantastically, and I hope you are too. In case you don’t know, my name is Sasha, I’m a 15 year old in Ontario, Canada, and I’m in a program called TKS, which is an innovation program for teens. Let’s dive right into it: what happened in March? 🚀
TKS Challenge - The MasterCard Foundation
Like I talked about in my last newsletter, we started a new challenge at TKS! 🤩In case you forget what that is, it’s kind of like a consulting project. So basically, we get a problem statement, and then we have to come up with a solution to it and present it in a deck. 🚀
Of Switch Health, Amazon Alexa, and the MasterCard Foundation, my team decided to focus on the MasterCard Foundation. 🌍Our problem statement was: “How can we create 30M green jobs in Africa by 2030?”
These are the three biggest lessons I’ve learned from working alongside a billion dollar company:
1. 🕰️Start early. Don’t get stuck in perfectionism, done > perfect. It’s better to submit something than not.
2. 🧑🤝🧑Talk to people. We begun our reachouts early, however didn’t connect with the right people until later in the challenge. Research can only get you so far, you will need perspectives from people living in the situation you’re trying to fix. As Shani always says: you can’t solve non-North American problems with North American solutions.
3. 🤝Team dynamic is everything. Our team all knew each other, but that didn’t stop us from running into a few bumps. Most of us were very busy over this month, so finding time to dedicate was sometimes challenging. But if you don’t enjoy working with your team, it’s not gonna be a very fun month.
I’d like to make a final shoutout to my team, Jens Thomsen, Shani Glassberg, and Omar Alweheshy. It was amazing working with you guys. 💖
If you are interested, you can check out our deck below! Feel free to let us know what you think, we are always open to feedback. :)
Material Science
You might know this already, but I LOVE material science. And it’s my focus at TKS, basically the topic that I go deep into and try to learn as much as I can about.🧠 In March, I finished the third stage of my focus - the review! 🥳
A review involves reading a whole bunch of research papers, so as you can imagine it took quite a bit of time. But it was 1000% worth it, I really enjoyed learning about the wonder material graphene 😉.
If you wanna check out my article (my video is pretty bad so just the article XD) here you go!
I am now on the final stage of my focus: the create! This is when you come up with a NEW idea in the field! 😍 I am partnering with Keerthana, and she is amazing, she knows so much about space tech!
And that’s all the hint you’re gonna get on what we’re working on 🤣 but you’ll hear more soon, I promise! :D
Life
Over the March break, I went skiing in Orford (Quebec)!!! We also went to Sutton on the last day. Looking back at these pictures, I really should have taken a cool action shot 😭. Still gorgeous though!
I also got to meet Santiago! Santiago was one of the people I worked with for the first hackathon in TKS. On the way back from Orford we stopped in Montreal, and Jolene and I stopped at a cafe to chat with Santiago for a bit. 🤩I also went to the TKS Toronto location yesterday to meet Keerthana, so we could work on our project! 🚀
Quote
As a precursor, I’m in the grindset (working really hard and loving it) right now, so this is what I’m currently thinking about. 🙃
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” - Cheshire Cat in Alice and Wonderland
One of the first things we learned in TKS was intentionality. Living your life without intention is pointless. Intention is the key to so many things, in my opinion.
For example: you scrolling on instagram/tiktok. While doing this, you acknowledge that “this is really how I want to live my life right now.” There’s nothing wrong with that. As long as you’re intentional about it.
Because time is our most valuable resource, you probably hear that all the time. But it’s true. I heard an interesting opinion from my mentor recently: no one is inherently good at something.
The only reason someone of a similar age demographic is better at something than you is because they’ve spent more time on it.
They chose to be intentional.
And you know what, I agree. I’m not good at video games, but that’s because I don’t play them, and I have almost never. So I haven’t put the time in to get good. But I’m really good at reading, because that’s what I spent my entire childhood doing.
And I can combine this with a really interesting discussion I had with Aatik, one of the TKS directors. There is no skill that is “the most valuable”. How would you measure that?
So, with that in mind, what would you be intentional about? Aatik’s take, and this has been really impactful for me, was that you should:
Choose the skill that you love the most, but that is still useful.
Because when you love something, it’s easy to do it, easy to improve.
Anyways, back to intentionality. The point of that was to be intentional about what you’re trying to learn, because you really do have the potential to get better at anything you choose, you just have to put in the work.
For me, that was coding. I wanted to learn to code because I thought I was supposed to, and don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic skill. But it isn’t necessary for me right now. So I might come back to it later.
But if you are intentional with how you spend your time, think of where you could be right now. If you know that you want to be a good presenter, you put time towards that. And then you will improve, you will become great if you put in the effort.
Everyone gets the same amount of time, it’s how we use it that differentiates us. That’s why certain people are where they are right now. Because they were or weren’t intentional about their time. 🧠
And another part about being intentional is knowing what you want. You can’t achieve success if you don’t know what success is. So you can’t get to where you want to be if you don’t know where that is. So this is going to take some reflecting. ↗️
🤔Think: what are you working towards right now?
For me, and this is one of the reasons I chose this quote for my newsletter, it wasn’t anything significant. It was “I’m doing stuff, checking the boxes.” Not “I’m currently working on developing my profile so I can get an internship.”
See how the second one is more long term, and can actually allow me to achieve my goals?
💭And then ask: what do you want to be working towards? What is the thing you really want? I bet you know, it’s probably just really deep inside you. But you can find it.
And then when you define what you want, you can determine the steps to get there. Talk to people, learn stuff. The world is literally at your fingertips. 💻
🎯Action items:
What am I doing right now?
What do I want?
How do I get there?
(Second one is the hardest btw, but even if its something small, like I want to read more books. From there, you can quantify that to “I want to read 1 book a month”.)
But as a final note, be intentional about how you spend your time. Think in minutes, not hours. Because that’s how you get to where you wanna go. 🚀
Books/Podcasts
🎧 Diary of a CEO by Steven Bartlett
This podcast is one of my favourites! The host talks to people from all walks of life, including athletes, celebrities, and entrepreneurs. It’s main focus is helping you understand how to create the life you want. My favourite episode is E101: The Happiness Expert that made 51 million people happy. HIGHLY recommend 😍 Really changed my perspective on a lot of stuff, and the guest is an engineer, so he applies logic to inherently unlogical things, and I love it so much. <3
📕Endure by Alex Hutchinson
A lot of people ask how I got into material science in the first place, and it’s a valid question. Because not many people even know what it is, never mind find it as fascinating as I do. But this book is the reason behind it. It’s about pushing the limits of endurance, and it also touched on the top gear that is created to assist the athletes with that. And I found that insanely cool. Now, I’ve steered a bit away from the sheer sports X material science combo, but that’s because material science is just such a broad topic. But anyways, if you like sports/discipline, read this book!
Next month
how the moonshot went 🌌
more info on my create … 🤩
hopefully some more articles
and erm… whatever else comes up XD
As always, thank you so much for reading, and I hope you enjoyed. Have an Amazing April, and see you soon :)
—Sasha ❤️
Loved this !!!