2019 Middle School Winners

Winni Ye is an eighth grader at JHS 194 William H. Carr in Whitestone, New York. Winni and her co-producers submitted the video as an assignment for her film class, and at first treated it like any other school assignment. However, researching plastic pollution opened Winni’s eyes to the reality of humans’ impacts on the environment. She says, “The garbage, the plastic waste, it seemed to be an endless sea. This drove me to create the video not only as a way to educate the film and drama students that would watch the video, but also as a way to educate myself and remind myself of what harm I did to the environment and how little I had to sacrifice to make a big difference.” She chose Sustainable Resource Use as a topic to highlight because it’s an issue that needs more public awareness and has easy actionable solutions.

Though Winni has taken film production at school for the past three years, this was her first time submitting a video to a contest. Because their project group included five people, Winni and her teammates found it hard to coordinate everybody’s schedules to find time to work on the video together; often, the only time they had to work together was over lunch, and sometimes even their lunch schedules didn’t line up. Because of that, Winni advises future contest participants to make a realistic plan before starting their video: “You have to make sure that you can complete the video before the deadline, but rushing to finish the video would not help.”

Winni’s favorite subjects in school are math and science, and she hopes to one day pursue a career in biology. She shared that although she’s “not the most active person around,” she likes to go to the park to play tennis and handball with her friends. In her free time, she likes reading, writing, and listening to music.