Hello, my name is Margaud. I am half Belgian and half Vietnamese. I’m 15 years old and have been attending UWCSEA in Singapore for the past seven years. I was born in Singapore and three years later I moved to Holland, where I went to the British School. After three years, my family and I moved back to Singapore and have been here since then. For the majority of my life, I’ve been exposed to an international community with a mission, stating that they want to unite different people for peace and a sustainable future. Since I was only seven when I joined UWC, I adapted to the mindset quite quickly and wanted to do whatever I could in order to make the world a better place.
Ever since I was young, the idea of helping others seemed to be completely natural to me, and I was surprised when I first learnt that people were harming other people. A few years ago, I learnt about the Sustainable Development Goals, which were made by the United Nations. I started to research about them in my free time and wrote what I thought could be done in order to achieve them. While I still think they’re great ideas, I now understand that it’s not as easy as it looks because all participating parties need to make an effort and work together in order to achieve the goals.
Some of my strengths are that I’m a quite open-minded person and I’m willing to listen to anyone who would like to say something, no matter what religion, culture or nationality they have. I like to think that I’m adaptable to different social situations, for example; in a room full of leaders and extroverts, I’m likely to be the person who listens to their ideas. When I’m with introverted people, however, I take initiative and try to kickstart conversations and let them express themselves without the fear of saying something wrong. When making decisions, I tend to follow my heart and not my head. I do still think before I do things, I just listen to my heart as much as I do my head. This might not be seen as a strength by some people, but I believe that that’s one of many things that make up the good people in this world.
In the future, I still don’t know what I would like to do. I don’t know if I want to be a lawyer and help to defend people who don’t have a voice, or a designer who makes posters which raise awareness for things that people need to know about. I do know that I want to be happy. Whether that’s having a job that I feel passionate about, or surrounding myself with people I care about. I also know that I want to do something that helps people, no matter what others may think.
School has been the main influence for me to have these aspirations. This may or may not be a good thing because I have no idea about what life is like outside of UWC, so when I graduate from this community in a few years, no matter how much I’ve been prepared, the ‘real world’ will still come as an immense shock. Perhaps the fact that I’m aware of this will allow me to have a smoother transition from school to adulthood.