Ten student leaders from BISS Puxi represented the school at the ACAMIS Student Leadership Conference at United World College, Changshu. According to the ACAMIS website, the conference is grounded in the principles of Academic and Cultural Enrichment (ACE). It was designed to provide a safe, inclusive and enriching environment where students could collaborate, test ideas and develop the confidence and skills required to lead change beyond their own school context.
The conference focused on Social Innovation as innovative service, not entrepreneurship or business creation. Students were expected to arrive with a single, agreed project concept developed by a team of 3–5 students, which they had already researched thoroughly. Our school was represented by two teams consisting of students from Year 10 to Year 12 whose team leaders have shared the reflections below:
On Saturday, March 7, my teammates and I participated in the ACAMIS Student Leadership Conference at United World College, Changshu. The conference involved student leaders from over ten different schools coming together to share ideas of their Social Innovation projects with one another and seek feedback on refinement. The aim of the projects was to identify real-world problems and develop creative solutions to create meaningful impact in our communities. Prior to the event, our team held pre-conference meetings to discuss our project and prepared a project proposal to discuss during the event.
Throughout the day, we attended workshops on leadership and innovation, communicated with other student leaders to learn about their projects and share ours, and received valuable critique of our ideas. The aim of the event was not to find perfect solutions for the projects’ shortcomings but to identify these concerns and move forward with a sense of clarity. Our team’s project aimed to work towards reducing waste and helping children in need, and we will develop it further based on the feedback we received. The conference also introduced the possibility of creating a short post-conference video to showcase selected projects internationally, which could be an opportunity to further share our work as we continue refining it.
Hyeyoon Min, Year 12
The experience that my teammates and I had at the ACAMIS Leadership Conference was both unique and exciting. The objective of our project was to improve readership in Nord Anglia schools globally for which we conducted in-depth research to determine who is affected, why addressing this issue matters, and what steps we need to take. We stepped on to the conference floor with some nervousness about our topic and were initially hesitant about our topic as we were all new to the protocol. The conference provided us with the opportunity to discuss our projects, ask specific questions and share ideas with like-minded students from other schools.
By receiving feedback from our peers, we were able to deepen our understanding of our project. Listening to others’ thoughts and questions helped us to appreciate the assumptions we were making and encouraged us to look more deeply into the problem, allowing us to refine and clarify our solution. Our main takeaway from the conference was establishing a stronger understanding of our topic ideas, which will help our team develop more effective solutions in the next stage of our project. Now that the conference is over, my teammates and I will record a narrative video that introduces our project, explaining how it would solve the problem and benefit many students in Nord Anglia, which we are all looking forward to.
Sohyeon (Jasmine) Yun, Year 10
