 Broadcasting live via Think Tech Hawaii Studios in downtown Honolulu. Welcome to Top of the Line. I'm your host Ben Lau. Aloha and thank you for tuning in. Today I take note of the turn of the calendar and upcoming Lunar New Year. Our episode today is in line with all this. My guests today are especially dear to me. They have been viewers and supporters from the beginning, my beginning on this show. They have contributed questions for me to pose to previous guests as well as general guidance and feedback all along the way. I've referenced some of them in prior shows by name. Behind the scenes I've taken are referring to them as my A team, my advisory team. In almost a poetic way, today's four guests are the ideal bookend or bookends to my previous four guests. Ends and endings though is wholly off the mark. Slight pun intended there Mr. Mark Kazowitz. Whereas my previous guests have reached the pinnacle or are nearer to the summit of their professional endeavors, today's four guests are near the early beginnings of their own ascents. A sense up their own mountains of life, love, career. Their search for meaning and purpose. To borrow from one of their millennial contemporaries are nation's first youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman and the title of her poem read at the presidential inauguration. My A team bring fresh perspective as they face the hill we climb. That hill they each now seek to ascend. Alexa, D-Ren, Michael, Sabrina, thank you for joining me on the show today. Hello. Please let me have you introduce yourselves. Hey everyone, thanks so much for being with us today. My name is Michael Stricker and I'm a self-proclaimed problem solver. I graduated from Georgetown University in the spring of 2020, the degree in psychology and business. I since worked in both the hospitality and education industries with my most recent position being as a middle school math and religion teacher here in the Bronx. Looking forward to a great show guys. Hi everyone, my name is Alexa and I'm Dalian all the way from Taipei, Taiwan. A little bit about myself. I have a bachelor's in business and a master's in education and the weird mix because education is my business. I'm currently working at Junction Academy and I'm developing their international college counseling curriculum and I'm hoping to incorporate it into their day-to-day school so they all have a mission when they graduate and I'm currently just very excited to be on the show. Hi everyone, my name is D-Ren and I am a musician and an inspiring entrepreneur. I like to write songs, make wine and kombucha and all sorts of other things. I'm inspired by human connection, self-expression, mindfulness and human empowerment. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, I worked for a startup where we designed and manufactured robots that help students engage in critical 21st century skills. Since then I've been entering and focusing in the world of hospitality and food and where I hope to start my own restaurant someday. I'm thrilled to be on the show with you all today. Hi I'm Sabrina, thank you so much for having me on the show. I studied computer science at Wesleyan University and then I decided I wanted to pursue a career in medicine and started at Columbia University's post-bac pre-med program. I completed that last spring and now I'm working on a mental health technology startup while applying to medical school. Thank you, share with us. How have you been spending these past couple years? How has the pandemic affected you? The pandemic for me gave me opportunity to realize that I wasn't as happy as I could be. I wasn't making very much time for myself and I wasn't very present for my friends and family so I quit my role as CEO from the startup that I was working at so I could make time to do the things I really want to do. Like many of us I reflected on my values and the problems of the world and my interests and ultimately I learned that it's okay to take a step back sometimes and to evaluate what makes you happy you know what's really driving you and it's okay to restart you know when the time is right it's always okay to restart again. Yeah that sounds great dear and you know COVID hit during the second semester of my senior year. I went from traveling, eating and being with friends 24-7 in Washington DC to moving back home to my family's house in suburban New York. That whole year I had been working in the hospitality industry as a business development analyst for Jose Andres' distinct food group. Unfortunately like so many others in the hospitality industry I lost my job that spring. A few months later my grammar school principal called and asked if I was interested in teaching in the archdiocese so I went home I dusted off my suit and I made my way to the Bronx to St. Francis to Chantel. I was originally supposed to be here for two weeks to help out an ailing teacher and 15 months later I think I've developed quite the curricula for both middle school math and religion. You know I always thought I'd be commuting into New York City in a shirt and tie but I thought I'd be taking the training to Grand Central as opposed to driving down 95 every single day to the Bronx and switching out quarterly reports for report cards has been quite the adjustment albeit a great learning experience. That sounds great Michael. I was going into my second semester of post back when the pandemic hit and similarly everything went online. One of my research positions and a lot of the other activities I was doing also suddenly were just not possible and so like many people I had to figure out what to do in this totally unprecedented situation and so I helped to create a COVID resource website. I called isolated seniors I began delivering free food to local hospitals for staff who were just so overworked and exhausted they didn't even have time to eat a meal and from bringing those meals I actually met somebody at a local hospital in the Bronx and he allowed me to shadow him and also do some research with him which was an amazing opportunity and because New York was such a hot spot for COVID there was also pretty much no clinical opportunities outside of that and so I ended up traveling to Kentucky to shadow a cardiologist there and so I think overall of course COVID was a really extremely challenging and difficult and terrible time but it did push me to find new and unique opportunities and it actually helped me find some really valuable experiences. It brought you close to first responders so it also brought you close to all the things that first responders had been dealing with right? Yeah and it was really it was amazing to see how you know in their own they were putting themselves in danger to just really help out all these people and do such important work. And how does that does that influence or inform you as to what you've chosen to do now? Yeah I think it really just confirmed how important this work is and it really made me know even more that this is what I want to be doing. Wow Sabrina I feel that you work in the industry that I was just very commendable. I guess I've been very lucky in COVID because I live in Taiwan and my country has been in lockdown for two years. We have a two-week quarantine for everyone that travels and so in that way life is generally normal here except no one can go anywhere. However I've had my own challenges. I've made large career pivots in my life. I went from business to education. I was training for sales leadership at Coca-Cola and now I'm apprenticing under management at Jenshin Academy. I also pivoted in languages going from an English speaking environment to getting a master's degree in my second language Chinese because I want to get to know the Taiwan education landscape and it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I had to memorize every single slide given to me by my professors to scaffold language and knowledge and now I've transitioned from a mentee to a mentor role where I'm helping my current students and I'm kind of an unconventional teacher because I'm always trying to teach them business skills and as I said before setting goals and reaching out to people using Google Calendar, managing their time and leveraging LinkedIn and all these kinds of skills so that they'll be prepared when they leave high school. Alexa you're not just someone who's pivoted geographically and career-wise going from New York to California or from Taiwan to California back to Taiwan. You're sort of grooming yourself and being groomed for this somewhat of a determined or determinable future right? You are focused in Taiwan and plan to be there. Definitely I had a 10-year plan but it was so hard pivoting definitely. Thank you guys. Can you share a little bit about your hopes and dreams your aspirations expectations maybe with a little bit more detail? Absolutely you know I take a rather utilitarian approach to success meaning that I'm interested in providing the most good into the world. After being laid off from was a really great position with a celebrity chef I realized just how capricious my own success was. When I started as a teacher at St. Francis I recognized the importance of helping others achieve their goals. You know I don't want my students to just shoot to work and become pharmacists. I want them to own their own pharmaceutical companies and personally for me spending a Tuesday afternoon covering for gym class and throwing the football outside or decorating our classrooms for Christmas is a far better use of time than going to any corporate retreat. So you know I want my kids to recognize their own potential, find the joy in education, hard work and most importantly just being their best true selves. I think that's a great approach to success. Michael remind me if I'm correct but you've only been out of college yourself for a couple years you're already giving back to society and raising others. Yes sir what can I say you know the Catholic education has really proven to be quite instrumental in my own professional career. Thank you. I would say that I can really connect with you as an educator. When I was working at Coal Cull and Sales all my KPIs were about myself and since I started working at a school and working with students I started realizing that it's much more rewarding when I can influence others and really bring them up and it just brightens my day when I can see my students' eyes light up when they come up with a new idea or did something on their own that they did not expect and so I would say working in education my entire perspective has changed. That's pretty amazing Alexa. My hopes for the future are that we as a human race can come together and think critically on how can we raise one another up. My goal in the next five years is to start my own restaurant that is 100% run by renewable energy and I'd like to be able to offer really competitive wages that allow my professionals that I'm working with to be able to enrich themselves and to be able to empower themselves as well. That's great. Combine that with your very wonderful talent as a musician, as a performing artist, I think a winning combination. Look forward to hearing all about. Thank you for sharing your goals. I kind of wonder how you've shared those goals but have they changed or the strategies in achieving your goals along the way changed? So as I mentioned in college I studied computer science and then I later changed to medicine and so I think I have felt a lot of pressure in high school to pick what I was planning to do basically for the rest of my life at such a young age and so for me I chose computer science because I thought it was a technical skill that I could apply to a lot of different fields and so my goal was always to try to apply that to something else and so even though I switched fields to some extent for me it was actually more of like a focusing on my original goal and especially because I want to become a doctor but I also hope to apply technology to hopefully find a way to just improve healthcare in some way and right now I've become particularly interested in applying artificial intelligence to medicine and I'm actually taking a course on machine learning right now so I'm trying to keep up my technical skills while applying to medical school. Sounds like we're all making pivots here that's amazing Sabrina the way you want to fuse these different fields and disciplines together. So for me pre-pandemic I wanted my main values that would drive me were to be famous to be well known and to you know be really financially successful but I found myself being really miserable instead working the job I was working don't tell my dad I was working for his company excuse me but yeah I was miserable and I decided that it was time for me to move on so I moved to Austin Texas I became a janitor and six months later on the hat I was the happiest I've ever been I released two songs which is something that I've been wanting to do for the last 15 years I fell in love and then I also had time to explore the different areas of interest for other professions that I was considering at the time and I learned how to live a little bit more simply and and what really made me tick in terms of being happy but I couldn't have done that if I hadn't redefined my value system to slightly healthier values. Diren you just touched upon this in bringing up your father in the past with robotics he's been the head of robotics and engineering at a major university in the United States. Let me ask you all generally how do you think your outlooks and perspectives vary from others in your lives others such as your parents your grandparents? Yeah so one thing that I've recognized is the importance to not just stay with the status quo but instead to really innovate and push forward. One thing I've recognized in some of my jobs is the need for some people who've been here for a while to just work in the past so this is what we need to do now and therefore it's going to work in the future. However what I've recognized is it didn't work in the past it's not working now so we need to change in order to find a way forward. You know when we recognize that we need to take initiative and if we recognize that if we try and do the same thing over and over again and expect different results that's just not going to work. So if we want to improve and get better we need to take chances and some of those chances are going to be wrong we're going to have some step backs but that's okay because in order to be successful moving forward it's going to take all of us to truly try and innovate. I totally agree with you Michael I feel like there's you know we don't settle our generation millennials Gen Z whatever comes after that maybe that's called Gen P we I don't know we don't settle yeah we don't settle for the let for the least amount of things that we can accomplish or the least impact that we can do and I think that's because we have more in our fingertips than ever before we have the interwebs the internet the cloud so so many things that have advanced us forward we see how there's so many we saw the wonderful things online of people people doing great things and we we understand that there's all this extra space for not just these people that are already there but for us as well and we have this really high level of integrity for ourselves to not stoop to a certain level and you know some of us have this safety net as well we're a little bit in better financial standing than past generations and I think that really enables us to take the road less traveled more often to take more risks and take more chances especially when that means being able to raise the tides for other people while also improving ourselves great answers guys great answers we have we have educators among you we have two professional educators among you I got a touch upon that can you go educators tell us more about this important area and your experiences especially at a time such as this oh yeah throw the question back at the other educator in the chat now Alexa what have you seen as being the biggest gaps in education what are you guys doing to address them as I've said before technology has been such an asset to the generation of students nowadays however I feel that our ability to be able to change the channel every time we don't like something has also made them I guess lack a bit of grit and perseverance and intention and so one of the things that my school has been doing is that we have a mountaineering program and in this program we train students to climb mountains kind of like the show and over the course of a year they climb different mountains of different heights and they will ultimately train up to climb a 3500 meter mountain over four days this is one of the toughest heights that any of them ever had to do and through falling and just suffering and thinking that they can't do it all of them will push through at the end of four days and learn that sometimes it's worth pushing through and getting to the other side and this is a program that I love that the students love that really changes their lives and I hope through this program you know we can train the next generation to have a little more grit Oh absolutely and you know I think I go on the same wavelength as you when we're talking about technology well it is a fantastic asset and it becomes all-consuming it becomes a significant problem actually last year during finals I put a challenge to some of my students I told them that if you guys come and you show me that you've deleted TikTok off your phone or Snapchat or YouTube or whatever it is that takes up the majority of your time if you cannot go on that for a single second during finals week then I'll give you guys extra points on your test and most importantly if every single person in the class bands together and does not participate in this then everyone will get extra points on both their math test and their religion test and and to the credit of the students they went without TikTok they went without YouTube and I remember when I first posed this challenge they thought no we won't be able to do this we need it and after the first day the second day they were telling me wow I got a lot of sleep last night I helped my parents cook I did the dishes I talked with my grandparents and to me that was really interesting to see you know recognizing that technology is an asset but also we can step away from that you know I think that the importance of applicable skills to education is key whether that be engineering or just or mountaineering or whether that's you know to step away from technology at any given time you know how important really is the Pythagorean theorem sure you know the basic theory maybe not so much but the discipline to solve these complex problems and maybe even to struggle through it and get a couple questions wrong along the way well you know now that's crucial you know students need to be motivated to care about their education especially when it's challenging and in order to do that we need to make it fun and applicable that's great that's great Michael and thanks for the takeaway so the stock advice is to short social media definitely as you talk goods out of it your generation as Diren touched on this has been you know labeled in many many different ways and who knows what other labels will come I thought this was quite interesting and provocative your generation has been labeled as the unluckiest generation what are your thoughts about that I don't agree that we're the unluckiest generation I think all generations have their ups and downs and that we're definitely included in that but I think I mean even within the medical field I was recently speaking to a female physician who was of an older generation and she was telling me how incredibly difficult it was for her in medical school she was super outnumbered by her male peers and then once she went to residency she felt like she constantly had to deal with prejudice and bias and she originally wanted to be a surgeon and the environment was so uncomfortable for her that she actually changed specialties so well of course many of those biases still exist to some extent today medical schools now are usually around 50% or more female and if I was lucky to be admitted to medical school I feel like I could pursue whatever specialty I'm interested in and so from that regard I think we've made a lot of progress in some ways no look while that might be the case at the end of the day in our generation today we have continued racial discrimination we're dealing with climate change a mental mental health crisis that's awful and ever-increasing disparity in wealth and on top of all this people are ever more attuned to these issues through social media and the globalized world when we immerse ourselves in these issues not just on any given hour of any given day but constantly throughout our entire lives there's no way this couldn't be troubling long term we've seen in just the past two years how online learning hybrid learning virtual learning has taken such a toll on the generation of kids and students that we need to be impressing upon the most so with that in mind you know I think we've had our our true share of adversity over the past couple years I feel like this is a dual-sided sword that we're talking about here in terms of being the unluckiest or luckiest generation because I feel like our well-being is quite good as a generation we have so much information we have the internet and other so many other resources in the United States we're fortunate to have a quite a strong education system as well as the ability to act freely and to think freely which is critical for our nation but on the other hand we are dealing like you said with immense well with other immense problems such as climate change like you like you mentioned and then there's of course the immense polarization of political parties and all of these problems are going to eventually come to the surface and become more and more visible as time goes on which is inherently going to create a lot more stress on our generation because we're going to be the ones to solve it and as well as the future generations so it's up to us to come together and have compassion to have different perspectives so that we can solve these problems and one of the good things is that we are really quite well equipped going further and further into the future as we come closer together to solve these problems but again we can't really do it on our own we have to bring up and we have to bring up the underprivileged communities as well you know not just the privileged view right you know you said come closer together what impressed me about this group is you guys come close together very quickly find common things just without even having to try you have the common aspirations and goals and wanting to be of service to others and give back at such early ages and early stages of your own careers I have really been very impressed and proud to know you and in ways you're all educators and all teachers and this one student is very grateful I mean you have so much there's you know against you too you have so much with loving parents and support networks as you all have sort of touched upon but you know I had one or two financial crises around the time I graduated you had one of the biggest ones ever we have occasional illnesses and things like that and some of those crises or viruses don't touch all of our lives the latest one is one of the longest and it's we're nowhere near the end of it and you've all talked about how it's caused you to adjust your life or even contributed to your I think DRN referred to it as his misery but that may also have been what he was doing just you've got an indefatigable optimistic taken on kind of thing do you guys are you confident that you're going to be able to help continue the human race and and fight these things off including climate change which more of a certainty than a theory yeah absolutely you know I think that we've all recognized that we have these immense problems and we're not just going to push it to the next generation we're not going to wait for someone else to solve it for the type of people who like to see okay this is the problem we have it wasn't working before it's obviously not working now so like I said before we don't change it it's not going to fix itself on its own in the future I think that's great is the fact that we're able to be you know interconnected not just all across the country but right now we've got people all across the world tuning in working with each other communicating all at the end of the day looking to solve problems and that's pretty great I'm going to take a leap but I didn't hear much political activism in in any of you and that's maybe a blind and and broad assumption what do you do about those politicians that are there who it's anyone's question who they represent we just wait for them to move on till your generation can take hold or are you already seeing your generation beginning to take hold and make these changes make these positive corrections well you know Ben going to school in Washington do you see it George Shouts maybe the most political school if there is you know I had people who at the ripe old age of 18 were already saying this is one I'm going to run for state senator this is one I'll be a representative this is what my senate bid is going to look like they have these plans in place and like I said before we have more and more young people who are jumping into politics we have more and more young people who are jumping into activism I think that we are going to need to build from the bottom up like DRN said we can't just focus on the privileged few right those aren't going to need the people who are going to make the change we need to focus on everyone especially the underprivileged the people who have been the victims of all the problems that we have in society those are the people who are going to come in those are the people who knows what the problems are and know how to fix it thank you Michael oh my yeah on my end I would say that I would educate students to care and to vote and have an opinion and I think that is something that we can do as well in addition to just educating the minority do any of you have anything else to add we have to get ready to wrap this up nothing on my end okay if that's the case I want to thank you so much again I'm not going to belabor that point let me turn my appreciation to viewers viewers thank you for tuning in today I hope you've enjoyed these fresh voices and perspectives as much as I have best wishes to you and may the positive energies and thoughts from today's group carry you through the days ahead from my home and my guests to yours for me and my family and my extended family to you and yours my A-team and I wish you Mahalo and Aloha thank you and thank you to our host Ben who's done a wonderful job with the show thanks Ben thank you guys