There is a BIG PROBLEM
in our high school educational system today. Over 40% of
students are chronically disengaged from school.
This is a waste of over 6.5 million talented young minds in the United States alone! You can read the news reports and get lost in
the statistics, but a quick conversation with the youths around you will reveal
that the obvious reasons for their lack of interest in school has to do with the
archaic and uninspired model of cramming academic knowledge into their minds. This teaching method doesn't suit humans, who are born to to think outside the box and solve the problems we
face creatively.
Founder of lean://gap, Eddy Zhong, clearly illustrates the immensity
of this issue in his TED Talk about “How School Makes Kids Less Intelligent.”
And he's not the only one, many young leaders expresses the same experiences about the deficiencies of our current high school educational system. If the goal of any society is to grow and educate the next generation of citizens who will be responsible for the well being of the world, then the investments of today should be aimed at the present through believing in the talents in all young people and supporting the growth of that talent by entrusting them to be leaders today.
Definition of Entrepreneur: a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, usually with considerable initiative and risk. a Leader.
Truth is, we are ALL entrepreneurs. Since birth, everything we did, every
decision we made, we are taking initiative to understand the world and risking
ourselves all the time to make progress in our lives. Why stop? What happened?
When did life turn into autopilot?
Eddy is pursuing a mission to empower high school
students to create their own futures, and we students from all over the world
support this vision by committing ourselves to lean://gap, the first and only high school entrepreneurship accelerator in
the world that brings students' ideas to life through an intensive 6-week
summer session. At lean://gap, we'll have the opportunity to work alongside professional engineers, designers,
Harvard & MIT professors, and other successful young entrepreneurs. Just
like the competitions Eddy spoke about in his TED Talk, we will be executing
our ideas by building prototypes and competing against other projects to acquire
funding and launch our start ups. Throughout this intensive learning experience,
we would emerge as battle-hardened veterans with the necessary skills and
resources to confirm, create, test, and build companies that bring valuable
solutions to the world.
Out of the 1000
applicants, and over 200 interviews, lean://gap Stars are the 40 of us chosen to
participate in this revolutionary new concept of HS education. This
program has a lower acceptance rate than Harvard. We were chosen
because we've demonstrated the entrepreneurial spirit by persevering with our
projects and our vision to better the world despite the lack of support. Each
one of us have many great ideas with immense potential but unable to act upon
these ideas due to the limited resources, connections, and capabilities of our unfavorable
educational environments.
Dixon Magister wants to invent a wearable interface that allows users to feel the 3D objects created in the virtual world.
Jason Lu and Ariful Islam wants to work on a non-profit to bring bicycle to children in third-world countries who live too far to walk to school.
Olivia Ross wants to change the way we see important topics such as war, disability, education and race through innovative mobile applications, RPG games and even hardware.
Eric Chen wants to create something audacious, something people will call it stupid, quixotic. And then he will work tirelessly to prove them wrong, to change the world and make it a better place.
Akanksha Kataria wants to merge her passion for business with music, dance and social reform.
Phillip Chao wants to create a graphene supercapacitor portable power bank that has integrated swappable wall outlet prongs, with the addition of wireless charging for phones and a sim card slot for a wifi hotspot.
Still unsure how or why Entrepreneurship is a gratifying path to success and happiness?
Check out these success stories from others our age when they started out on their entrepreneurial journey:
How can you support us?
Leangap is a phenomenal opportunity for the cost of only
$6,000 per student. However, without financial assistance, a number of us are
unable to participate even though we worked tirelessly to be accepted. While
many campaigns may have had months in advance for preparation, we Leangapstars
on the other hand, have less than 2 weeks to build this campaign from scratch
and raise enough fund to grasp this opportunity of a lifetime. We already see
the revolutionary potential of this educational platform and we are unwilling
to give up no matter how small the window of opportunity is.
Although the true cost of funding some of the students approaches
$30,000, we are aiming for $13,000, because we are making efforts to acquire
funds from those closest to us. However if this campaign goes beyond our goal,
every bit goes to the living costs of attending the program as
well as alleviating the burdens from our families and friends.
When you support us
you are not only putting these brilliant
students through a revolutionary educational platform that will help create their futures, you are also validating lean://gap as a effective tool to train and educate the leaders of tomorrow. You
become a visionary and an entrepreneur, just like the founders of Leangap, who
see that in the near future, all high school students would have the
opportunity to become the creative contributors of society that they are and
not only through the path of a traditional
education.
It's bigger than us. If our campaign is successful, together we will have created a chain reaction for more young aspiring entrepreneurs founding their own companies and creating new futures for themselves. We will have played a major role in creating the new face of education.
Perks! -------> ^
and other ways to help:
1: Follow us on Twitter: @leangap_start
2: Like us on Facebook: facebook.com/leangapstars
3: Buy us coffee!
4: Buy us a lot of coffee! XD
5: Visit our website! Share that too if you want ;)
About the coffee...
[No really. We're serious.]
If each person who visited this campaign, donated $4.45, that's enough to get a Java Chip Frappuccino from Starbucks. How easy is that? That's why it's so important that we share this campaign. If we can get at least 2,697 people to buy us coffee, we would have enough money to fund all six of our applicants.
THANK YOU
from the deepest of our hearts!